To the nines: 1999

Sure, some say 1939 is the gift that keeps on giving. Perhaps, 1999 is just as generous.

If box office receipts are to believed, everybody saw George Lucas’s “Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace’’ and “Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me.’’ But who remembers Martin Scorsese’s “Bringing Out the Dead,’’ with Nicolas Cage as a depressed paramedic, or Spike Lee’s “Summer of Sam,’’ which reframed the David Berkowitz murders as a neighborhood tragedy?

It was certainly the strongest year Hollywood produced in the last 20. By and large, the movies of 1999 were inspired, engaged, visionary. They took risks. Even the terrible ones - and three of the five Best Picture nominees from that year were, indeed, terrible - were worth fighting over. (I spent a lot of that year fighting about “The Green Mile,’’ “American Beauty,’’ and “The Cider House Rules.’’) Ten years later, most of these movies have aged well (not those three). From David O. Russell’s “Three Kings,’’ Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Magnolia,’’ and Anthony Minghella’s “The Talented Mr. Ripley’’ to Andrew Fleming’s “Dick’’ and Alexander Payne’s “Election,’’ the studios were making more high-quality movies than they are today, even as Adam Sandler vehicles and Bond pictures continued to fall off the assembly line.

So rather than offer the many films of 1999 as classics (whatever that means), I’ll simply present them for your consideration. More than being a bunch of movies that I like or find interesting, they also point to a melancholy that was in the air that year. In 1999 the country was in the grip of a Y2K panic and on the verge of an election year. American movies were on edge, paranoid, nervous about technology, or purely apocalyptic - so were we.

As part of a newspaper assignment, I spent the last night of the 20th century on a hill overlooking San Francisco, waiting for the end of the world. It never came, but I had plenty of time to think about how it would look and, even better, which movie it would look like. “The Matrix’’? “Fight Club’’? “Princess Mononoke’’? “The Blair Witch Project’’?

It all appeared to be on the verge of being over in 1999. Nothing was safe, and every character - nearly every single one - seemed to be in a funk. The world spent “The Sixth Sense’’ wondering what Bruce Willis’s problem was. Turns out he was dead. As tired gimmick as it was, Kevin Spacey narrated “American Beauty’’ from beyond. It rained frogs in “Magnolia.’’ “American Pie’’ turned adolescence into a hormonal horror show. The closest we really came to an antidepressant was a ride in John Malkovich’s head. And Woody and Buzz Lightyear worried about their very ontology in “Toy Story 2.’’ Buzz’s catch phrase was reframed as a spiritual matter. “To infinity and beyond,’’ indeed. Even our cartoons - “The Iron Giant,’’ “South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut,’’ and “Princess Mononoke’’ - were in some way roiled.

And 1999 might be the greatest year for animated filmmaking. If you include Disney’s energetic, borderline-hot “Tarzan’’ and ignore “Pokémon: The First Movie,’’ we got at least five different-looking films, four of which (sorry, “Tarzan’’) are astonishingly complex. Disney had the good sense to distribute Hayao Miyazaki’s “Princess Mononoke’’ (dubbed with American voices, but still).

The rage in Miyazaki’s bellicose eco-epic feels as wounding now as it did a decade ago. Brad Bird’s dolorous treatment of “The Iron Giant’’ granted Ted Hughes’s antimilitary fable stunning gravity. The anxious spiritualism in John Lasseter’s “Toy Story’’ sequel didn’t obstruct what could have doubled as an amusement park ride. And the “South Park’’ musical remains an ingenious work of satire. You could have filled out a Best Picture list with those four movies.

The success of the docu-hoax “The Blair Witch Project’’ inaugurated industry-wide panic that the old, expensive way of making movies was dead. Not quite, but it showed the world a glimpse of our homemade, digital futures. (It’s still the last movie that used real suspense to scare me.) David Cronenberg’s science-fiction mind game “eXistenZ’’ showed us the future as a society of video game addicts.

Cronenberg’s a Canadian, and 1999 looks even better when you open the discussion to non-American movies: Mike Leigh’s “Topsy-Turvy,’’ the Dardenne brothers’ “Rosetta,’’ Hou Hsiao-hsien’s “Flowers of Shanghai,’’ Tsai Ming-Liang’s “The Hole,’’ Pedro Almodovar’s “All About My Mother,’’ Olivier Assayas’s “Late August, Early September,’’ and Jane Campion’s “Holy Smoke.’’

If you want to know how spooky a year 1999 was, the director who should have been prophesying doom and uncertainty instead made “The Straight Story,’’ a tearjerker about an old man who rides his lawnmower across the country. Thanks, David Lynch. Meanwhile, the movie that seems to get better - as its defenders predicted at the time - is Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut.’’ It remains a missed opportunity to explore Nicole Kidman’s half of that marriage, but as a husband’s horny sleepwalk, its sexual nightmare feels less musty now and more characteristically paranoid.

Time will tell whether these movies will be considered classics on par with a spectacle like “Gone With the Wind.’’ For what it’s worth, most of them are better movies. But how we define “classic’’ has certainly changed in 60 years. We hear a lot about how fragmented and decentralized culture has become, how consensus is harder to achieve. Everything that rises now need not converge. That’s OK. The very idea of classic is both a kind of received wisdom and the beginning of some larger conversation about what constitutes greatness. The year 1999 is as good a place as any to let that conversation begin.

Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. For more on movies, go to www.boston.com/movienation.