American Beauty is a stain on Hollywood – but don’t blame Kevin Spacey

• Twenty-five years ago, in one of the greatest ever years for film, a relatively low budget character study opened in American cinemas. It did not have anything like the hype of the year’s flashier films – Fight Club, The Matrix, The Phantom Menace, Eyes Wide Shut – and was the work of a first-time British director, Sam Mendes, who had won accolades for his work in the theatre but was an untested quantity on screen.