Directed by Claire Denis • 1999 • France
Starring Denis Lavant, Michel Subor, Grégoire Colin
With her ravishingly sensual take on Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd, Sailor,” Claire Denis firmly established herself as one of the great visual tone poets of our time. Amid the azure waters and sunbaked desert landscapes of Djibouti, a French Foreign Legion sergeant (Denis Lavant) sows the seeds of his own ruin as his obsession with a striking young recruit (Grégoire Colin) plays out to the thunderous, operatic strains of Benjamin Britten. Denis and cinematographer Agnès Godard fold military and masculine codes of honor, colonialism’s legacy, destructive jealousy, and repressed desire into shimmering, hypnotic images that ultimately explode in one of the most startling and unforgettable endings in all of modern cinema.
Up Next in 1999
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Bringing Out the Dead
Directed by Martin Scorsese • 1999 • United States
Starring Nicolas Cage, Patricia Arquette, John GoodmanThis searing collaboration between director Martin Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader continues their ongoing inquiry into questions of guilt, torment, faith, and existential meaning. S...
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The Limey
Directed by Steven Soderbergh • 1999 • United States
Starring Terence Stamp, Peter Fonda, Lesley Ann WarrenSteven Soderbergh’s stylish, fascinatingly fractured revenge thriller stars Terence Stamp as a British ex-con who, following his release from prison, heads to Los Angeles to investigate hi...
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Bye Bye Africa
Directed by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun • 1999 • Chad, France
Starring Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, Garba Issa, Aïcha YelenaThe first feature by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun (and the first ever made in Chad) is an autobiographical semidocumentary in which the director plays a version of himself, an African filmmaker...
