For the longest time, despair was the keynote whenever film buffs got together for a chat. Movies were in trouble. Movie were eye candy. Hollywood was making thrill rides for the mall set. Dialogue was extinct.

We'd become so accustomed to the dumbing-down of American cinema that most movie lovers -- the ones I know, anyway -- had long assumed that the downward spiral was irreversible, that video games, computers and cable TV had captured a generation's collective brain and reduced its capacity to absorb language and complex emotions.

Well, we were wrong. Slowly, with inevitable exceptions, 1999 has emerged a landmark year for good movies. Maybe it's millennial, maybe not, but we're seeing more vitality, more inventiveness, more intellectual enterprise than at any other time since the 1970s.

If you don't believe me, try this exercise: Sit down, draft a list of the best films you've seen this year and see if you can limit your list to an even 10.

I tried it and came up with a provisional list, topped by Sam Mendes' splendid "American Beauty." I logged Bernardo Bertolucci's "Besieged," Steven Soderbergh's "The Limey," Eric Rohmer's "Autumn Tale," Wim Wenders' "The Buena Vista Social Club," Joan Chen's "Xiu Xiu," Wu Tianming's "King of Masks," Spike Jonze's "Being John Malkovich," Chris Smith's "American Movie" and Robert Altman's "Cookie's Fortune."

That's an embarrassment of riches. But who wants to leave out David Lynch's "The Straight Story," Kimberly Peirce's "Boys Don't Cry," Atom Egoyan's "Felicia's Journey," Pedro Almodovar's "All About My Mother," Carlos Saura's "Tango" or David Fincher's "Fight Club"? And what a shame to stiff such lighter but equally distinctive pleasures as "Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me," "South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut" or Alexander Payne's brisk satire "Election."

If this game isn't already frustrating, remember we have another month to go this year -- the month when Hollywood unleashes major Academy Awards contenders. Everyone's top-10 list could easily change once we see Anthony Minghella's "The Talented Mr. Ripley," Milos Forman's "Man on the Moon," Scott Hicks' "Snow Falling on Cedars," Tim Robbins' "The Cradle Will Rock," Luc and Jean-Pierre's Dardenne's Cannes Film Festival winner "Rosetta," Frank Darabont's "The Green Mile" and Alan Parker's "Angela's Ashes."

This year is remarkable not only for the number of outstanding titles but also for the ways in which movies smashed formulas, ignored moldy screenwriter templates and found new modes of expression.

Consider the impish surrealism of "Being John Malkovich," the dark vision of "American Beauty," the dense nightmare of "Fight Club" and "The Matrix" or the visual poetry of "The Straight Story" and "Besieged." No one could accuse these films of being recycled. None of them looks like anything we've seen before.

Even "The Blair Witch Project," a film that suffered from its own hype and is fated to be remembered as a marketing phenomenon, deserves credit for leveling the playing field of commercial filmmaking. A fluke in many ways, its legacy is still important: Anyone who's got the talent can make and market a film. Studio fat cats, beware.

Movies are enjoying a burst of creativity, but equally promising is the public's willingness to embrace new idioms and ways of seeing. Conventional production values and linear storytelling are no longer necessary to seduce the public, as "Blair Witch" and "Run Lola Run" proved. As long as you've got something to say, audiences can adjust to technical limitations or narrative leaps, and greet a film on its own terms.

Presuming sophistication on the part of the audience used to be risky; today it brings rewards.

So how did it happen that Hollywood and the international film community produced such absorbing, thoughtful films this year? It may sound glib and reductive, but I think the new millennium has a lot to do with it: It's a time for taking spiritual inventory, and the films we're seeing reflect that urge. Take a look at "American Beauty," for example, and see if it isn't asking the big questions about where we're going and how we might better conduct our lives.

I recently saw "Magnolia," a brilliant moral fable from "Boogie Nights" director Paul Thomas Anderson. "Magnolia," which opens here in January, also measures our collective emotional pulse. Combining several intertwining stories, Anderson observes a fragmented, morally exhausted America and delivers a sharp wake-up call. Let's stop deluding ourselves, he seems to say. Let's look at what we're doing, shine a brighter light and start to be accountable to one another.

Anderson might not have intended that as a millennial statement, but it certainly works as one -- especially when seen in the same context as "American Beauty." There's a spiritual quality to the questions he asks and the optimism and good will that run beneath them.

It'd be silly to argue that all the important films of 1999 share this quality. But there are enough of them, as we clean our slate and enter the next century, to suggest that our place in time is opening a new dialogue in film.