Best year ever: Three Kings

David O. Russell’s war movie hasn’t lost its bite.

David O. Russell’s Three Kings was one of several movies to scramble my brain and make me rethink what cinema could be when I saw it in October 1999. The war movie looked and felt like nothing I’d seen before, with its washed-out aesthetic, mix of humor and sudden violence, and themes that suggested maybe the Gulf War wasn’t the heroic endeavor we’d che…