Moments Out Of Time: 1999

Film Comment, Jan, 2000

* The middle-aged Gerald (Alain Libolt) taking out his glasses to look at a photo of a woman who may become his wife -- Eric Rohmer's golden Autumn Tale ...

* One of those days it's a minute away from snowing: the dancing bag, American Beauty ...

* The Straight Story: Alvin (Richard Farnsworth) and Rose (Sissy Spacek) watching the lightning storm ...

* Slow-motion bullet trajectories and time-lapse clouds, Three Kings ...

* The first time John Malkovich realizes he is speaking with someone else's voice -- Being John Malkovich ...

* "Yon can't always get what you want": the far-flung group sing -- excruciating and exhilarating -- in Magnolia ...

* The blankness of Rosetta's face while she waits for her boyfriend to finish drowning ...

* Red balloon sailing up a spiral stairwell, The Sixth Sense ...

* The queasy roll of a wooden Christ into underwater closeup, In Dreams ...

* In Boys Don't Cry, Brandon (Hilary Swank) watching through the windshield as Lana (Chloe Sevigny) walks fluorescent-lit toward the convenience store. The clerk tells her, "Dream on, Lana, I can't be sellin' you no beer tonight," and she replies, "Fine, I'll browse." ...

* In Besieged, a cleaningwoman (Thandie Newton) hoovers a rug while her enraptured employer (David Thewlis) watches and noodles at the piano: art and love in the making ...

* The End of the Affair: Sound of door closing on a lower floor. Husband (Stephen Rea) says it's the maid. Friend of the family (Ralph Fiennes), bent over a whisky glass: "No, it was Sarah's step." ...

* A postlapsarian pieta -- burnt-out ambulance driver Frank Pierce (Nicolas Cage) cradled in the arms of Mary Burke (Patricia Arquette): all that's left after Bringing Out the Dead ...

* Eyes Wide Shut: the hotel clerk (Alan Cumming)'s flirtation with, uh, Bill (Tom Cruise) ...

* The courtroom shouting duel between the Mississippi prosecutor (Bruce McGill) and the tobacco company lawyer (Wings Hauser), The Insider ...

* In Topsy-Turvy, the wonderful formality and discretion and play of language of Gilbert's "notes" after the dress rehearsal of The Mikado ...

* Cartman's Vegas finale to "Kyle's Mom Is a Bitch," South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut ...

* Ichabod Crane's journey up the Hudson River Valley in Sleepy Hollow: a haunted landscape straight out of Hawthorne and de Tocqueville ...

* The bright-red door of the Burnham home, glowing through curtains of pouring rain: American Beauty's unreal estate, as seductive as Gatsby's green light ...

* Re: goggles in Three Kings: "Those are for night vision -- they don't work in the daytime." "Yeah, they kinda work." ...

* Beau Travail's "Billy Budd" (Gregoire Colin) staggers through a sea of blinding-white salt, all his beauty burning away in the sun ...

* The practice duel between Keanu Reeves and his sensei (Laurence Fishburne) in The Matrix ...

* The ineffable Eugene Levy, American Pie's clueless, cardiganed dad, gamely striving for male bonhomie with his pastry-ravishing son ...

* Mira Sorvino tasting someone else in her husband's kiss, Summer of Sam ...

* "You!" On the stairs, in her husband's embrace, Sarah (Julianne Moore)'s rapt face at the sight of her descending lover -- The End of the Affair ...

* Sunlight haloing Magali (Beatrice Romand)'s wild thicket of hair: just one of many visual harvests in Autumn Tale ...

* An ice cream vendor (Isaach de Bankole) and a samurai assassin (Forest Whitaker) watch a man building a boat on a New York rooftop -- Ghost Dog ...

* Reading, by campfire light, a terrible diary that was never written: Limbo ...

* Grainy, greenish home movie footage of Mr. Death in his basement, cheerily describing the 19th century electric chair he's restoring: "so small it looks like it was made for a child or a woman" ...

* Dogma's trenchcoated angel with a Cockney twang (Alan Rickman) remembering the pain of telling a carefree little kid he had to grow up to be Jesus ...

* The sweet, shriven clarity of Lester Burnham's/Kevin Spacey's smile when he hears the news that his daughter Jane is in love ("Good for her") just before he becomes a casualty of American Beauty ...

* The Green Mile: The Pet Sematary creepiness of a scruffy gray mouse asleep in a cigar box, its 100-year-old heart laboring on ...

* An elderly retainer greeting tainted P.I. Nicolas Cage at the mansion door -- "Mrs. Matthews chose to take her life this afternoon" -- his dignity and self-contained grief an oasis in the deeply unclean 8MM ...

* A couple of broken-backed fingers sticking out of the gravel beside a roofed-over railroad line in The Bone Collector ...

* On the move in a screen-filling landscape, a car driven by a serial killer threads down a curving highway while a girl from Ireland -- potential prey -- trudges wearily off in another direction: fate and potentiality in Felicia's Journey ...

* In longshot, Connie (Stephen Rea) sprawls in an easychair, his Lolita (Sarah Polley) lying full-length across his lap, his hand inside her open jeans ... a poignantly erotic vignette in Guinevere ...

* On a California beach, under an unforgiving sun, a fortysomething lady in a bathing suit flirts with a hunky younger guy: Susan Sarandon acts her age with such brave pride you wish she was Anywhere But Here....