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In the Mood for Love (2000)
8.0/10on IMDb
Released
Sight and Sound's 2022 critics' poll placed it fifth among the greatest films ever made, higher than anything else from its decade, and it earns that by leaving almost everything unsaid. In 1962 Hong Kong, two neighbours discover that their spouses are having an affair with each other. Tony Leung became the first Hong Kong actor to win Best Actor at Cannes for it, Maggie Cheung moves through narrow corridors in one high-collared cheongsam after another, and a waltz borrowed from a Seijun Suzuki film turns each trip to the noodle stall into a ritual. If you see one film from 2000, make it this.
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Yi Yi (2000)
8.1/10on IMDb
Released
Nearly three hours with one Taipei family, and few films make ordinary life feel this full. Edward Yang follows the household from a wedding through the months after it: a father who has just run into his first love, a teenage daughter, a grandmother lying in a coma, and eight-year-old Yang-Yang, who photographs the backs of people's heads because they can never see that part of themselves. The whole film works on his principle. Yang won Best Director at Cannes, and a 2016 BBC poll of critics ranked it eighth among the century's films. Give it a free evening; the length is what lets it breathe.
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Memento (2000)
8.4/10on IMDb
Released
The year's cleverest thriller, and one that rewards a second viewing. Leonard Shelby cannot form new memories, so he hunts the man he believes killed his wife with Polaroids, notes and tattoos. Christopher Nolan plays the colour scenes in reverse order and intercuts black-and-white ones that run forwards, so you reach each moment knowing no more than Leonard does. Guy Pearce gives him the brisk courtesy of a man who has introduced himself a thousand times, which makes every friendly face look like a con.
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Werckmeister Harmonies (2001)
7.9/10on IMDb
Released
Choose this when you can give a film your full attention. Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky tell their story of a frozen Hungarian town in 39 long black-and-white shots across 145 minutes, and the first is among the great openings in cinema: at closing time, a gentle newspaper deliverer arranges the tavern's drunks into a working model of a solar eclipse. Then a travelling show arrives with nothing to exhibit but an enormous stuffed whale, and the town's men start gathering in the square. Mihály Víg's score makes the dread feel like weather. It is slow by design, and hypnotic once you settle into it.
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The Gleaners and I (2000)
7.7/10on IMDb
Released
The kindest film of the year is an 82-minute documentary. Agnès Varda took a small Sony camcorder, her first digital camera, into French fields, vineyards and city markets to meet people who live on what others throw away: a Michelin-starred chef who gleans, a field of heart-shaped potatoes, and Alain, who has a master's degree, eats from market leftovers and teaches French to immigrants. Her own curiosity is the thread. When she forgot to switch the camera off, she kept the footage of its swinging lens cap and called it a dance.
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Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
7.8/10on IMDb
Released
Ang Lee's martial-arts romance became the first film not in English to pass $100 million in American cinemas, and won four Oscars, Best Foreign Language Film among them. The theft of a legendary sword, the Green Destiny, sets it going, but the pleasure is Yuen Woo-ping's fights, performed mostly by the actors themselves with only the safety wires removed by computer, and the restraint of Michelle Yeoh, who learned her Mandarin lines phonetically without it ever showing. Everyone remembers the duel in the bamboo canopy. I'd take Yeoh working through a rack of weapons against Zhang Ziyi.
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Amores Perros (2000)
8.0/10on IMDb
Released
Alejandro González Iñárritu's debut opens mid chase, with a shot dog bleeding on the back seat, and the crash that ends it ties together three Mexico City lives that would never otherwise touch: a young man who fights his brother's dog for money, a Spanish model, and a scruffy hitman who lives with a pack of strays. It won the Critics' Week prize at Cannes and has the raw energy of a director with everything to prove. Know two things before you start: it runs over two and a half hours, and the dogfights are staged convincingly enough to upset, though the director says no dogs were harmed.
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Code Unknown (2000)
7.1/10on IMDb
Released
Michael Haneke's Paris mosaic is built from unbroken long takes, and the opening one plays like a complete short story. On a busy boulevard a young man tosses the remains of his pastry at a Romanian woman who is begging, another young man objects, and the scuffle ends in an arrest and a deportation. Each of them, along with Juliette Binoche's actress, then gets a strand of their own, and the film keeps cutting away mid-scene, the way a city leaves its strangers half-known. It asks you to make the connections yourself, which is its appeal.
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Requiem for a Dream (2000)
8.3/10on IMDb
Released
Ellen Burstyn's Oscar-nominated performance is the reason to brave it. She plays Sara, a lonely Brooklyn widow who is told she might appear on her favourite game show and starts on diet pills to fit back into an old red dress, while her son and his friends deal heroin to fund their plans. An average 100-minute film has 600 to 700 cuts; Darren Aronofsky's has more than 2,000, many in the stuttering bursts he fires off whenever someone gets high. It is relentlessly bleak, and the distributor released it unrated rather than cut it for the R rating.
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Traffic (2000)
7.5/10on IMDb
Released
The drug trade from three directions: a Tijuana cop caught in a cartel feud, a conservative Ohio judge appointed the President's drug czar, and a San Diego wife who learns what her husband really does for a living. Steven Soderbergh shot it himself and gave each thread its own look, Mexico bleached through tobacco filters, Ohio and Washington a cold blue, so you always know where you are. Benicio del Toro won the Oscar for a performance given mostly in Spanish, and Soderbergh took Best Director in a year he was also nominated for Erin Brockovich. It is the year's sharpest American ensemble drama.
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George Washington (2000)
7.2/10on IMDb
Released
A debut made for about $42,000 that Roger Ebert named among the ten best films of 2000, calling Tim Orr's cinematography the best of the year. David Gordon Green cast local non-actors in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and follows 12-year-old Nasia and the boys she hangs around with through a hot summer, among them George, whose skull never hardened after birth. The kids talk in odd, lovely half-sentences, and the film is content to listen. Choose it for mood and faces rather than plot.
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Battle Royale (2000)
7.5/10on IMDb
Released
A school class, gassed on a coach trip, wakes on an island in exploding collars with three days to kill one another until only one is left alive. Kinji Fukasaku drew on his own war: at 15 he was a munitions worker, and after an artillery attack the surviving pupils had to dispose of the dead. His fury at adults who betray children is in every frame, and Takeshi Kitano's teacher is chillingly offhand. Members of Japan's parliament called it crude and tasteless. The violence is constant and graphic; watch it as a furious satire, far angrier than The Hunger Games, rather than a teen thriller.
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Joint Security Area (2000)
7.7/10on IMDb
Released
Before Oldboy, Park Chan-wook made this mystery set on the border between the two Koreas, where two North Korean soldiers lie dead in a guard post and a Swiss army investigator has to untangle the survivors' conflicting stories. The investigation is only the frame. What lands is Song Kang-ho's North Korean sergeant, so warm that the border's absurdity hurts. Park had the border post rebuilt as a set at a studio in Namyangju, and about 5.8 million admissions made it, for a time, the biggest hit in South Korean history.
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Dancer in the Dark (2000)
7.9/10on IMDb
Released
It won the Palme d'Or, and it is the most emotionally punishing film here. Björk plays Selma, a Czech immigrant in 1960s Washington State who is going blind and saving every cent for an operation to spare her son the same fate; to get through factory shifts she imagines herself in a musical. Lars von Trier shoots the drama with a jittery handheld camera, then films the daydreams with more than 100 digital cameras at once, so the songs break out of clattering machinery and a passing train with a freedom the rest of her life never allows. Björk won Best Actress at Cannes and afterwards did not want to act again. Choose it only if you are ready to be wrecked.
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Almost Famous (2000)
7.9/10on IMDb
Released
The year's most lovable film. In 1973 a 15-year-old lands a Rolling Stone commission and goes on tour with a rising band, Stillwater, and Cameron Crowe, who wrote for the magazine as a teenager, won the Oscar for the screenplay. He screened it for Jimmy Page and Robert Plant in London, and Led Zeppelin let him use their songs, though never 'Stairway to Heaven'. Kate Hudson and Frances McDormand were both Oscar-nominated, and Philip Seymour Hoffman, as the critic Lester Bangs, gives the best advice in the film down a phone line. Put it on with friends.
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Gladiator (2000)
8.5/10on IMDb
Released
The Best Picture winner that brought the Roman epic back: a general who refuses to serve the new emperor loses his family and his rank and fights his way back as a slave in the arena. Ridley Scott started shooting while the script was still being rewritten, built about a third of the Colosseum in Malta and added the rest digitally, and lost Oliver Reed to a heart attack before his scenes were finished, completing them with a body double and Reed's face added digitally. Russell Crowe won Best Actor, but Joaquin Phoenix's Commodus, an emperor sulking like a spoiled boy, is the performance that lasts. See it on the biggest screen you can.
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Wonder Boys (2000)
7.2/10on IMDb
Released
Paramount released it in February 2000, watched it flop, tried again in November and watched it flop again, and it remains one of the best comedies of its decade. Michael Douglas plays Grady Tripp, a Pittsburgh writing professor whose second novel has swollen out of control, through one literary-festival weekend in the company of his most gifted and morbid student, played by Tobey Maguire. Douglas gained 25 pounds for the part and has never been looser or funnier, and Robert Downey Jr. is gleefully shameless as his editor. Bob Dylan wrote 'Things Have Changed' for it and won the Oscar.
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You Can Count on Me (2000)
7.5/10on IMDb
Released
Anyone with a sibling will recognise it. Laura Linney plays Sammy, a single mother and bank loan officer in a small Catskills town, and Mark Ruffalo her drifting younger brother Terry, who turns up needing money. They know exactly where each other's bruises are, and their arguments are funnier and sadder than most films' climaxes. Kenneth Lonergan grew it from one of his one-act plays, shot it in 28 days for $1.2 million and cast himself as the minister trying, very gently, to get through to Terry. It tied for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, and Linney and the script were both Oscar-nominated.
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Sexy Beast (2001)
7.3/10on IMDb
Released
Eighty-eight tight minutes, and Ben Kingsley dominates every scene he is in. Ray Winstone's Gal is a retired London crook baking contentedly by his pool on the Costa del Sol when Don Logan arrives to recruit him for one last job, and Don does not accept no. Kingsley plays him as a coiled, foul-mouthed terror and earned an Oscar nomination, while Winstone, all soft bulk and quiet dread, makes the perfect target. It is Jonathan Glazer's first feature, and the strange, dreamlike touches he brings from commercials make a familiar heist story feel new.
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The House of Mirth (2000)
7.0/10on IMDb
Released
Gillian Anderson's finest film role, and the reason to choose this over a more comfortable costume drama. Terence Davies cast her because she resembled the women in John Singer Sargent's portraits and made her Lily Bart, Edith Wharton's New York beauty with expensive tastes and no money of her own, who has to marry well before her looks and her credit run out. Anderson gives her a brittle poise that makes each small social misstep land like a blow. Scottish houses such as Gosford House stand in for Gilded Age wealth, and Davies films them with a stillness that turns every lost invitation into a sentence passed.
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The Circle (2000)
7.4/10on IMDb
Released
A grandmother in a Tehran maternity ward hears that her daughter has given birth to a girl, and her face falls. From there Jafar Panahi passes the camera from woman to woman across the city, each running into a rule that would never stop a man, until the title explains itself. He made it for about $10,000 with a mostly amateur cast, won the Golden Lion at Venice and saw it banned at home.
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Under the Sand (2001)
7.0/10on IMDb
Released
A study of denial carried almost entirely by Charlotte Rampling's face. She plays Marie, an English professor in Paris whose husband of 25 years goes for a swim off a beach in the Landes and does not come back. François Ozon spends the rest of the film on what grief looks like when nobody can prove there is anything to grieve, and Rampling never asks for sympathy, which is why it hurts. It runs a lean 96 minutes, and Ingmar Bergman reportedly watched it several times.
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A Time for Drunken Horses (2000)
7.7/10on IMDb
Released
Eighty minutes of hardship that never turns into a lecture. In a Kurdish village near the Iran-Iraq border, young Ayoub, now head of his orphaned family, works with the smugglers to pay for an operation his disabled brother Madi needs. In the mountain winter the smugglers feed their mules whisky so the animals can survive the cold, one of many details that make the stakes physical. Bahman Ghobadi shot it in his native village with non-professional actors, and the snow and the loads are real enough to feel. It shared the Caméra d'Or for best first feature at Cannes.
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The Day I Became a Woman (2000)
7.3/10on IMDb
Released
Three short, fable-like stories of Iranian women at three ages, all filmed on Kish Island in the Persian Gulf, make up Marzieh Meshkini's first feature. The middle one is unforgettable: a young wife in a chador pedals on in a women's cycling race while her husband gallops alongside on horseback threatening divorce. Before it, a girl on her ninth birthday watches a stick's shadow shrink, knowing that when it vanishes she must put on the chador; after it, an old woman spends an inheritance on everything she was once denied and has local children carry it down to the beach. At 78 minutes, its images last far longer than the film.
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