82. American Beauty (1999)

Starring: Kevin Spacey, Annette Bening, Mena Suvari

Director: Sam Mendes

Running Time: 122 mins

American Beauty is an American film detailing the events in a suburban street, where one man, going through a mid-life crisis, quits his job, strangely becomes obsessed by his teenage daughter’s best friend, and sees his wife having an affair with another man, causing him to fall into a deep depression.

This was such a brilliant film. The actors were fantastic, it was a very original storyline; very intriguing for me to follow, along with a great blend of serious messages about life itself and fantastic comedy, as well as being one of the weirdest films I have ever seen, but that is to be expected with a film directed by Sam Mendes.

The interesting thing about this film was how it started as a relatively comedic and funny thing to watch, however as the story developed, and people’s lives started to go wrong, it ended up being incredibly dark and strange.

Kevin Spacey’s performance in this movie was incredible in my opinion, being able to play the typical ‘loser’ suburban father who finally cracks and decides that he just wants everything to go his way, which was definitely a very realistic and interesting role to see him portray.

As well as being very intriguing as well as entertaining, I found this film to be quite sinister beneath its main face, which was often shown during the movie, giving it another aspect for me to think about, and for being one of the most interesting, albeit strange, films of the year, I’m going to give this a 9.0.