Best Movies of 1998
Ranked by our critic's grades, best first.
Saving Private RyanThe Omaha Beach landing rewrote combat filmmaking; the sentimental frame around it is the weaker part.Read the review
The Truman ShowA comedy about surveillance that turned out to be a documentary, and Carrey has never been better.
The Big LebowskiA noir plot handed to a man with no ambition, and the jokes keep working twenty-five years later.
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking BarrelsGuy Ritchie's debut is a machine of converging coincidences built on almost no money: cocky, quotable and uninterested in anyone as a person.
American History XEdward Norton is ferocious enough to carry a film whose account of how a man unlearns hatred is much thinner than its account of how he learned it.
Velvet GoldmineGorgeous to look at and structurally hollow, a film that dresses a shrug in feathers and glitter.
FollowingNolan's whole career in miniature, shot on weekends for the price of a used car.
CelebritySven Nykvist's black and white is wasted on a film whose leading man is impersonating the director instead of playing a character.
ArmageddonCut so fast that space itself loses its geography, and Bruce Willis still lands the ending.
The Man in the Iron MaskA handsome production sunk by a script that lurches from grief to slapstick and an ending where the firing squad politely misses.