When the Motion Picture Academy looked at the year 2000, it gave its Best Picture award to a sporadically watchable CGI demo reel called Gladiator. I've picked something else:
1. The Gleaners & I
Directed by Agnès Varda
An essay-film about people who glean food from the fields after the harvests are over; and urban scavengers who find sustenance in the trash, sharing their leftovers with the neighbors; and artists who make assemblages from trash-picked materials; and the director herself, making a movie filled with serendipitous moments she gleaned from all the hours her camera happened to be rolling. Without being obvious about it, Varda was documenting a gentle kind of anarchism—finding, as the slogan goes, the seeds of a new world in the shell of the old.
2. Yi Yi
Written and directed by Edward Yang
As rich a portrait of a family as you'll ever see at the movies.
3. You Can Count On Me
Written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan
Another sort of family, another sort of portrait.
4. Dark Days
Directed by Marc Singer
A documentary about the world some homeless people built in the tunnels beneath New York—sort of like that book The Mole People, only Dark Days is actually true. It could be screened as a darker, sadder companion to Gleaners.
5. Rejected
Written and directed by Don Hertzfeldt
There are your run-of-the-mill films about filmmaking, and then there is this mad masterpiece.
6. High Fidelity
Directed by Stephen Frears
Written by D.V. DeVincentis, Steve Pink, John Cusack, and Scott Rosenberg, from a novel by Nick Hornby
Jack Black's breakthrough, and possibly his peak as well. No matter how many bad comedies he has wasted his talents in since, we'll always have the memory of him taking the stage to sing "Let's Get It On" and effortlessly stealing the show.
7. Memento
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Written by Nolan from a story by Jonathan Nolan
"Maybe it's time you started investigating yourself."
8. Sexy Beast
Directed by Jonathan Glazer
Written by Louis Mellis and David Scinto
Ben Kingsley as the anti-Gandhi.
9. Almost Famous
Written and directed by Cameron Crowe
"The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we're uncool."
10. Code Unknown
Written and directed by Michael Haneke
The first decade of the 21st century saw several big-cast, multi-story, everything-is-connected movies, some of them so ham-fisted and didactic that it became easy to forget how great the genre can be when it's done right. But Haneke did it right. This window into a set of interlocking lives in Paris, Mali, and Romania is an antidote to Crash, Syriana, and the rest of the heavy-handed tedium that came later.
Honorable mentions:
11. Panic (Henry Bromell)
12. Wonder Boys (Curtis Hanson)
13. Brave New World (Theo Eshetu)
14. Amores Perros (Alejandro González Iñárritu)
15. Buffy the Vampire Slayer 4 (Joss Whedon)
16. The Heart of the World (Guy Maddin)
17. Faithless (Liv Ullmann)
18. Gangster No. 1 (Paul McGuigan)
19. Tragos (Antero Alli)
20. Unbreakable (M. Night Shyamalan)
Note: Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a TV show, so Whedon is listed as the showrunner, not the director. Though he did, as it happens, direct four of that season's episodes as well.
Of the films of 2000 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in Tears of the Black Tiger.
