MikePadgett.com

• Director: Sam Mendes
• United States, 1999
• 

In a year of superb films, American Beauty was one of the very best of 1999: the auspicious film début of Donmar Warehouse director Sam Mendes, the consolidation of Kevin Spacey’s position as a distinguished lead actor and a reminder that Hollywood could still turn out very great movies.

Still surprising today are the potentially massive difficulties of representing the material and how screenwriter Alan Ball and subsequently the company of filmmakers and actors overcame it. After all, it’s got paedophilia, voyeurism, out-in-the-open homosexuality and drug use.

Somehow they’ve managed to take all of these elements, place them carefully in front of a backdrop describing the bitter loneliness of a suburban existence and create a sad, funny and emotionally involving picture.

• Director: Al Pacino
• United States, 1992
• 

“A four hundred year old work in progress” goes the tagline to Pacino’s first feature as director and the film itself took four years and six editors to make.

But the result is perfectly cohesive: a kind of documentary about the highs and lows of doing Richard III, glued together by Pacino’s mesmerising performance as compère in the documentary and Richard III in the drama.

The rapid cutting between documentary and drama did leave me feeling like I wanted to see two movies. It will be interesting to see how Pacino deals with similar content as director of the forthcoming Salomaybe?.