American Beauty

Director: Sam Mendes

1999 / 122min / 35mm

Perhaps the most universally praised American film of 1999, Mendes’s blistering black comedy is a both-barrels broadside directed as smothering suburban mores, starring Kevin Spacey as 42-year-old burnout Lester Burnham, whose midlife meltdown—and fixation on his teenage daughter’s best friend (Mena Suvari)—will have catastrophic consequences for his family and neighbors. “Full of its own brand of corrosive novelty… Evinces a real and ever more stirring compassion.”—The New York Times