100 Best Movies of 2000, Ranked by Tomatometer
Remember the Titans celebrates its 20th anniversary!
“In the Year 2000…” sang Late Night with Conan O’Brien band member Richie “LaBamba” Rosenberg in a falsetto during one of the better-known skits of the 1990s. Conan and sidekick Andy Richter would then humorously imagine what the year 2000 would be like, including that “magic markers will smell worse” and presidential campaigns running ads “accusing their opponent of coming up with the idea for Jar Jar Binks.”
Turns out that the actual year 2000, being the last year before the world irrevocably changed after 9/11, and a year when hardly any computer systems crashed due to a whole lot of hard work, was a year in which there were a metric ton of good movies.
Knowing what we know now, this list of the 100 Best Movies of 2000 is a starting point for numerous huge franchises, and a coming-out year for many of our favorite actors, actresses, and directors. Most especially, it’s the year when the world transitioned from VHS video tape into DVD, greatly enhancing resolution, sound, and the uncanny ability to find any scene you wanted.
Movies moved from something you bought or rented into something you collected. Built-in commentaries provided the layperson with crucial insight into the filmmaking process. Deleted scenes gave the fans glimpses into what got left on the cutting-room floor. For the first time, people started to understand that “widescreen” meant black bars on the top and bottom of your picture tube until TV dimensions caught up with the size and shape of movie theater screens.
Our criteria for this Top 100 of 2000 is threefold. First, Certified Fresh movies sorted by Tomatometer (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Memento, Gladiator). That’s followed by Fresh movies on with 40 or more critic reviews and 60% or higher on the Popcornmeter (Snatch, Remember the Titans, Unbreakable). And, finally, there’s Rotten movies with those same stats, with this last group considered cult classics and audience favorites (Miss Congeniality, The Way of the Gun, Pitch Black).
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(Photo by Artisan/ Courtesy Everett Collection. REQUIEM FOR A DREAM.)
The 73rd Academy Awards, broadcast March 25, 2001, honored movies released in theaters during the 2000 calendar year. Unlike the hesitant and hand-wringing 2002 broadcast, just a few months after 9/11 and featuring Tom Cruise giving a speech about how it’s still OK to like movies, this early 2001 event was full of optimism and verve. Steve Martin hosted for the first of three times.
In an extraordinary and unusual event, Steven Sodberbergh competed against himself for Best Picture, clearly at the top of his game and nominated for two very different films: drug-trade thriller Traffic and earnest real-life legal drama Erin Brockovich. The other Best Picture nominees were Chocolat, a film that combined sweets and sensuality to a delicious degree; Hong Kong martial-arts wuxia blockbuster Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (and many viewers’ first experience with Chow-Yun Fat, Michelle Yeoh and director Ang Lee), and Best Picture winner Gladiator, one of five statues that Ridley Scott’s epic historical film would take home that night.
Snubbed from Best Picture were movies like the love letter to 1970s rock-n-roll and Rolling Stone Almost Famous, Christopher Nolan’s mind-bending Memento, the crowd-pleasing Tom Hanks desert island film Cast Away, and the downbeat psychological trip Requiem for a Dream.
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(Photo by Fox / Courtesy Everett Collection. X-MEN.)
Aside from critical acclaim, the year 2000 is notable that almost all the highest-grossing films that year were not sequels, but rather the start of franchises that would continue for many years afterward.
The lone exception is also the worldwide box office leader in 2000: Mission: Impossible 2, known by fans as “the weird one” in the impossibly long-running franchise and the only one directed by slow-mo and doves fan John Woo. This one’s an honorable mention, falling just outside this top 100.
Other franchise starters include X-Men, 20th Century Fox’s ambitious kick-in-the-pants to the Marvel movie revolution. Many X-sequels and spinoffs followed before Disney’s acquisition of Fox slowly integrated the mutants into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, beginning with 2024’s Deadpool vs. Wolverine and continuing with 2026’s Avengers: Doomsday, which includes dozens of Marvel characters from every universe.
Box office titans Meet the Parents, Unbreakable, Chicken Run, Final Destination, and honorable mentions Charlie’s Angels and Scary Movie would kick off one or more sequels in succeeding years. Even Pitch Black, which only made $53 million worldwide, became a cult classic, introduced the world to Vin Diesel, and launched a series of Diesel pet projects and video games set in the same universe.
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(Photo by Buena Vista/ Courtesy Everett Collection. THE EMPEROR'S NEW GROOVE.)
Among great animated films released in 2000 are Chicken Run, the hysterical stop-motion spectacular from masters of the form Aardman, Disney’s The Emperor’s New Groove, the slapstick classic that began as a dramatic musical before being overhauled, and the superlative sequels Rugrats in Paris: The Movie and The Tigger Movie.
General audiences were not yet ready for more mature animated features, so Don Bluth’s space opera Titan A.E. landed with a thud initially, but became a cult classic later in life. Similarly, The Road to El Dorado, the love triangle ode to Bob Hope’s road pictures that tried very hard to emulate a Disney movie, complete with Elton John soundtrack, may not have resonated with audiences at first, but found its way on home video.
One surprise misstep from Disney did not make this list, despite doing well at the box office: Dinosaur, an early CGI talking dinosaur picture not to be confused with Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur.
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(Photo by WB/ Courtesy Everett Collection. BATMAN BEYOND: RETURN OF THE JOKER.)
We mentioned Mission: Impossible 2 and Scary Movie as honorable mentions because of their critic-proof box office and their part in long-running franchises. Here are other films that bubbled under our top 100.
Children of many generations love Jim Carrey’s heavily made-up performance in the live action remake How the Grinch Stole Christmas, though it’s best watched with adults firmly out of the room. Me, Myself & Irene, the Farrelly Brothers’ attempt to recreate the success of Dumb & Dumber, may have failed in that attempt, but it’s still full of quotable Carrey lines. And who could forget the stoner comedy Dude, Where’s My Car? and its pronounced effect on pop culture for many months afterward?
Anime was still new to the average public, and most anime feature films in the early 2000s only saw limited theatrical releases, if at all, forcing hardcore otaku to hunt down the DVDs at places like Suncoast and Sam Goody. Not enough mainstream critics saw a pair of compelling and bloody vampire movies to make this list: Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust and Blood: The Last Vampire.
And we couldn’t end this discussion without mentioning the ineligible straight-to-video Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker. The first-ever PG-13 DC Comics animated feature, this film was heavily cut for violence in the wake of the 1999 Columbine shootings. It took until 2002 before the uncut version appeared officially, finally restoring the filmmakers’ original intent. (Steve Horton)
