Cyberreality Bites. Boys, Toys and Girl Trouble in 1999's Top Ten.

It was, of course, predestined that the top-grossing movie of 1999 would be "Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace," which outstripped its closest competition by nearly $200 million to rack up a cool $431 million at the box office. Twenty-one years of mass-cult loyalty fueled the fires of the prequel's success, which was further stoked by the marketing millions that Twentieth Century Fox sank into the movie. Writing in these pages last year about the top-grossing movies of 1998, Carl Bromley noted a tendency in Hollywood movies, now that they no longer have Russia or China to kick around, to turn their rage inward and imagine the self-destruction of American political and cultural institutions.