90s All Over Me takes inspiration from 80s All Over, the Drew McWeeny/Scott Weinberg podcast that attempted to review every major film release of the 80s one month at a time; that podcast ended circa early 1985 and McWeeny has continued the project on his Substack. The aims of this series are somewhat more modest; rather than covering every month and release in said month, each entry will cover a year of the 1990s, focusing solely on what I’ve seen from that year. The first half of each instalment spotlights what I saw theatrically at the time, contextualising those works in my own moviegoing journey from ages seven to 17 as well as their wider cultural import. The second half covers every other release I’ve seen of that year across physical media, television, and streaming.
Read the previous instalments on 1989, 1990, 1991,1992, 1993,1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, and 1999.
- 1998 Total films seen: 155
- Total seen theatrically: 72
- VHS/TV/DVD/Streaming: 83
Theatrical
On January 1, 2000, the 1990s—and indeed the 1900s, the 20th century, and the second millennium AD—were done. But as my preceding eleven-piece autopsy of the decade revealed, success and failure ripple across the years, careers rise and fall, trends burn bright and burn out, and I thought it worthwhile to extend this series into the first year of the 21st century, to cap off the 90s and peek ahead at the shrapnel the decade left lodged in stars, filmmakers, and moviegoers alike.
Some of the big characters—before and behind the camera—aren’t present: Spielberg would return in 2001 with AI: Artificial Intelligence, though his studio DreamWorks is behind some of the notable releases of 2000; Stone would return in 2004 with Alexander, a wonderful, frustrating Ancient epic; Tarantino would return in 2003 with magnum opus Kill Bill, expanding his storytelling repertoire beyond LA-set crime films and showing genuine visual panache. But a lot of the gang were here.
As per my 1999 piece, a number of the theatrical viewings below were clocked the following year, especially the Oscar contenders. As the tally indicates, I was going to the cinema weekly, sometimes a couple of times a week. I don’t say this to show off; though I was very much a discount day guy, I cringe to think of the amount spent on movie tickets. But at 17 to 19, that was just the deal: a little income, mostly discretionary, no debt, as opposed to my current position of decent income, little discretionary, debt.
But don’t cry for me, because in 2000 I got to see in theatres:
Battlefield Earth, Supernova, and Red Planet
Easy joke, though the joke might be on me for seeing these three movies theatrically. In fairness, Supernova and Red Planet are at the very least watchable and functional films, the former despite a troubled production—with big names like Francis Coppola and Walter Hill in the jumble—the latter despite having two very unchill guys—Val Kilmer and Tom Sizemore, R.I.P. both—on set in sweltering Coober Pedy.
Battlefield Earth, in contrast, is unbearable to watch: poorly made, poorly acted, ugly to look at. For a perverse vanity project derived from sci-fi pulp by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, in which John Travolta casts himself as a giant dreadlocked alien villain and shamelessly chews scenery, the film doesn’t even have the decency to be camp. Director Roger Christian, who worked as a production designer on Star Wars and Alien, doesn’t mention the film in his autobiography, even as a footnote. Travolta is nothing if not resilient, with a couple of cycles of setback and comeback already under his belt; while he bounced back from Battlefield Earth, I don’t think he was ever “cool” again.
Thirteen Days, The Patriot, and Mission: Impossible 2
If there was a Mount Rushmore of Hollywood superstars of the 1990s, Costner, Gibson, and Cruise—divorced of subsequent misdemeanours, indiscretions, and stumbles—along with Julia Roberts (see below) would occupy a rightful place on that monument. A case could be made for others, like John Travolta, though his winning streak didn’t kick off until Pulp Fiction in 1994; or for Tom Hanks, though he didn’t do action; the flip side for Stallone and Schwarzenegger, who didn’t do much else. Costner, Gibson, and Cruise, in contrast, were all-rounders.
Of course, none were infallible, and while their 90s were wild at times, nobody in 2000 could have predicted the even wilder 25 years to follow: Cruise doing some of his very best performances over the next five years, before jumping off the deep end of Oprah’s sofa and bouncing back a few years later as a work-obsessed hermit predominantly making action movies where he risks his life for the same three to four directors; Gibson becoming a polarising figure, director of savage historical epics, and jobbing B-actor, with occasional opportunities to be indisputably brilliant and compelling in major movies, albeit playing scum-bums; and Costner charting his own weird course through the quarter century, sometimes a star and sometimes a supporting player, the era bookended by delivering one of the finest 21st century Westerns (Open Range) and a rather monumental hubristic miss (Horizon).
The seeds of all three trajectories can be seen in these three films. Costner was a producer on Thirteen Days, and by most accounts regards himself as co-director or creative partner on any film he works on. Dramatizing tensions in the Oval Office in the thick of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the film is to some extent a companion piece to JFK, but it’s also infused with the actor’s Boomer nostalgia for yore, the sort of nostalgia that stirs a man to self-finance a four-part Western saga starring himself. However, for an actor frequently dinged for vanity, Costner’s a generous co-star to Bruce Greenwood and Steven Culp, giving them the floor as the Kennedy brothers, and his studio weight and disinterest in pinching runtime empower journeyman Roger Donaldson—reunited with Costner after No Way Out—to do the very best work of his career.
The Patriot, meanwhile, is a bruising historical epic of the Braveheart mould, with Gibson essaying another freedom fighter seeking revenge and deliverance, this time during the American Revolutionary War. Despite its heavy Americana, the film’s a shake-up for director Roland Emmerich and producer Dean Devlin, veering away from their previous popcorn sci-fi work, but Gibson’s in his wheelhouse and would press further in that direction as director with The Passion of the Christ and Apocalypto.
Finally, Cruise is today the overriding auteur of both his filmography and the Mission: Impossible series, but in 2000 relinquished some of the tonal grip on his franchise to John Woo. That makeover, sadly, was not the slam dunk envisaged, nowhere near as fun or nimble as Woo’s Hong Kong films or three prior American films—lacking their texture, visceral kick, and dynamism—nor the Hollywood classics (Notorious, To Catch a Thief, Charade) the movie gestures towards. The film is seemingly engineered as a reminder—following his long absence with Eyes Wide Shut and arthouse digression with Magnolia—that Cruise is the coolest, drawing on some of the same signifiers of coolness as Days of Thunder a decade earlier, despite said signifiers not helping that film. There are, however, impressive and cleanly-shot action sequences that punctuate the boredom.
The Sixth Day, Get Carter, and Unbreakable
The big guns of 90s action in a disparate trio of films. Sci-fi actioner The Sixth Day has its moments and fun sequences, but where early 90s Arnie was advancing the genre—Total Recall, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, True Lies—titles like Eraser, End of Days, and this are just solid programmers. Like Travolta post-Battlefield Earth, there’s a case to be made that after getting pregnant in Junior and portraying Mr Freeze, Schwarzenegger was never really cool again.
Get Carter has a stacked ensemble and some style, a sturdy Stallone performance, and on paper feels like a logical post-Copland move—more grounded, more character-focused, surrounded by strong actors—but pales in comparison to its British source text. The film could have used a dash more Stallonean excess. Nonetheless, there’s more left-handed personality in this title than it’s given credit for.
Unbreakable is the best of the three, reuniting Bruce Willis with his Sixth Sense director on a superior (from my POV) thriller deconstructing a genre (comic-book heroes) about to become omnipresent on film. It was a smidgen too early, but I think that benefits the film, letting it be its own curious beast. Haters fixate on the jarring, rug-pulling ending as gimmicky, ignoring how Shyamalan expertly ratchets up the tension over the preceding 100 minutes.
Like the trio of stars above, these three Planet Hollywood restaurateurs—and indeed Shyamalan—would have a wild quarter century: Schwarzenegger going into politics, returning to movies as a B-player, and clocking another four (diminishing) Terminator appearances; Willis, as he did in the 90s, starring in equal parts trash and treasure in the 2000s, then mostly trash in the 2010s, before retiring with a heartbreaking health condition; Stallone, surprisingly, proving most resilient in the 21st century after a wobbly start through his Aykroydian entrepreneurialism, reviving and strip-mining his legacy franchises, kicking off new ones, selling merchandise, becoming one of James Gunn’s repertory company of mutant character actors, and venturing into both prestige-adjacent TV (Tulsa King) and reality TV (The Family Stallone); and Shyamalan exhausting his Sixth Sense goodwill, trying his hand at a couple of anonymous journeyman assignments, then bouncing back as a mischievous purveyor of Larry Cohen-esque high-concept thrillers.
The Art of War, Vertical Limit, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, The Crimson Rivers, and X-Men
A curious snapshot of the state of the action movie at the start of the 21st century away from the three-headed Hydra of Stallone, Schwarzenegger, and Willis. A serviceable Wesley Snipes programmer, cut from similar cloth to his serviceable 90s programmers, its lukewarm reception suggesting that Snipes—like many comic-book movie stars to follow—wasn’t immune to typecasting following Blade. A non-star-driven action-adventure from a gifted journeyman focused on location shooting and stunt sequences. A pair of foreign-language actioners—the former a humongous and deserved crossover success, the latter more a home hit but stylishly made—disparate but deferential in their own ways to Hollywood formula: Crouching Tiger to the Hollywood period epic, The Crimson Rivers to Seven-style thrillers and buddy-cop action movies. Finally, a comic-book movie that launched a star (Hugh Jackman), launched a franchise that splintered—to my best count—into 15 wildly varying sequels and offshoots, and helped cement Marvel as a filmmaking force and superheroes as the dominant coin of the realm.
Gladiator, Proof of Life, and Memento
In my last entry, I talked about following Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce’s careers intently after LA Confidential, and 2000 rewarded that brand loyalty. Proof of Life is aggressively okay, director Taylor Hackford failing to muster any of the romantic chemistry—despite Crowe and Meg Ryan’s offscreen romance—of his previous An Officer and a Gentleman and Against All Odds. But Gladiator is excellent, with director Ridley Scott harnessing his considerable skill to mount a savvy revival of the Ancient epic for 21st century moviegoers. Following a 90s of diminishing returns, this set the course for the next 25 years of Scott’s career as a larger-than-life, John Huston-esque adventurer-director mounting costly productions in exotic locales, culminating with a Gladiator sequel last year.
Memento similarly set the course for Christopher Nolan’s career; like Reservoir Dogs for Tarantino, it’s confidently made low-fi crime cinema, memorably written and acted and constructed tight as a bow, serving as a Rosetta Stone for his subsequent filmography while never hinting at the grand scales of production or variety of genres its director would ultimately tackle. At the core of Gladiator and Memento, Crowe and Pearce are outstanding, delivering two of the finest performances from Australian imports and bringing nuance to characters who could otherwise be sketched as simple action heroes or ciphers.
The Perfect Storm and O Brother Where Art Thou
George Clooney’s A-list ascent continues. Wolfgang Petersen’s disaster film A Perfect Storm is effective and appropriately stressful, albeit eventually becoming monotonous, while the Coen Bros’ O Brother Where Art Thou—their riff on The Odyssey—has aged like fine wine. I love that the Coens have worked with Clooney four times and, every single time, cast him as an idiot. The colour saturation techniques the film introduced, however, have made cinema a little blander.
Highlander: Endgame, Dungeons and Dragons, Shaft, and Charlie’s Angels
Four titles spun from IP—of varying pedigree—all still in circulation: there was a Shaft sequel in 2019, a Charlie’s Angels reboot that year too, a new and savvier spin (of the dice) on Dungeons and Dragons in 2023, and Highlander is constantly dogged by remake rumours and aspirations.
Highlander: Endgame and Dungeons and Dragons are the dime-store double feature here, though the former is notable for its Star Trek: Generations approach—before legacy sequels were in vogue—teaming film franchise star Christopher Lambert with TV offshoot star Adrian Paul, while the latter is notable mostly for some shameless hamming by Jeremy Irons. Shaft is solid, affording Samuel L. Jackson an action lead as an iconic character, but John Singleton’s film is neither fish nor fowl. In contrast, director McG and the game Charlie’s Angels cast are fully attuned to the assignment, producing something empty but energetic and zippy.
Dracula 2000, Scream 3, and Blair Witch: Book of Shadows
Three horror titles geared to a specific demographic. Wes Craven directed Scream 3 and gave his “Wes Craven Presents” seal of approval to former editor Patrick Lussier’s Dracula 2000, but not even the generally undiscriminating Craven would lend his name to the Blair Witch sequel, a creative misfire from respected documentarian Joe Berlinger.
Space Cowboys and Small Time Crooks
Not especially consequential titles from two (at this point) quantity-over-quality veterans, but Space Cowboys is notable for seeing Clint Eastwood tinker with special effects—things which notoriously cannot be captured in one take—for the first time since Firefox, while Allen is well-matched with Tracey Ullman in rags-to-riches comedy Small Time Crooks.
Snatch, Love, Honour & Obey, and Sexy Beast
Three very British gangster films chasing the tail of Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels. Snatch, courtesy of Guy Ritchie himself, is a lot of fun; the improv-heavy Love, Honour & Obey was no doubt fun to make for its creative team, but said fun isn’t infectious; and Sexy Beast, from the shrewd and obtuse Jonathan Glazer, has style and a tremendous, ferocious Ben Kingsley performance.
Reindeer Games and Way of the Gun
Two American crime films about scum-bum criminals in over their heads, both obvious stumbles for their directors. The former was John Frankenheimer’s final film; it’s fun, but a downgrade from Ronin and a long way from his very finest work (The Manchurian Candidate, Birdman of Alcatraz, Seconds etc.). The latter was Oscar-winning Usual Suspects screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie’s film debut: it’s intermittently engaging but its macho posturing, deliberate pacing, and sparse tough-guy exchanges feel try-hard. I wager nobody looked at Mission: Impossible 2 and Way of the Gun and figured Cruise and McQuarrie would become a powerhouse BFF partnership in the ensuing years.
Traffic, Erin Brockovich, Cast Away, and What Lies Beneath
Steven Soderbergh and Robert Zemeckis pulled Spielbergian one-two punches in 2000, the former scoring an Oscar in the process. Both double bills testify to their filmmakers’ malleable direction and besting of genres. Traffic is very good but a tad overrated; I prefer Erin Brockovich, an exceptionally-made human interest story with a dash more verve and vinegar than the norm, boosted by a terrific Julia Roberts performance. I noted above Roberts would belong on the Mount Rushmore of 90s superstars; while she had misses and hits in equal measure over the 90s, and there were other equally gifted major actresses over the decade, Roberts started and ended the decade so strong and so well-liked—Pretty Woman at one end, My Best Friend’s Wedding and Runaway Bride and Notting Hill at the other, with Erin Brockovich extra garnish in 2000—that her place on the monument is indisputable.
As for Zemeckis’s films, like Contact this pair sees Zemeckis striving to be respectable in a way befitting his Oscar win for Forest Gump while still scratching his genre and tech itches. Cast Away is an impressive acting and technical achievement, one that manages to make us feel for a volleyball no less, though I’m fonder of What Lies Beneath’s well-constructed, precision-tooled Hitchcockian hokum. As always for Zemeckis, the opportunities for effects and staging are the motor driving the production and piquing his interest, but unlike his trio of motion-capture animated films to come, Cast Away and What Lies Beneath find human anchors in Tom Hanks, Michelle Pfeiffer, and an against-type Harrison Ford.
All the Pretty Horses, Finding Forester, and Pay it Forward
A trio of Oscar prestige wannabes, but the Academy’s anointing proved elusive. As noted in an earlier piece, I don’t subscribe to the notion that people make films to win Oscars: they make films to tell particular stories, work with particular collaborators or in particular locations, tackle specific genres or themes, etc. However, studios will greenlight said films based on Oscar prospects, and I don’t doubt Miramax greenlit Billy Bob Thornton’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel All the Pretty Horses for that very purpose, then interfered in a very Miramax way when the finished product did not conform to their wishes. In contrast, Finding Forrester feels exactly the movie Gus Van Sant set out to make, and after his beating on Psycho can’t help but feel very safe and calculated. Ditto Pay it Forward, which feels like Chat GPT attempted to write an Oscar-winning inspirational drama.
American Psycho and Chopper
This double bill could also be dubbed Men Behaving Badly. These were two of the first three R-rated films I saw theatrically—along with Boys Don’t Cry—after watching R-rated titles on home video for years through obfuscation and chicanery. Both films perpetuate a charismatic amorality I find deplorable, but are very accomplished in their craft, with undeniable star-minting turns by Christian Bale and Eric Bana.
Hollow Man, The Cell, The Watcher, and High Fidelity
More Men Behaving Badly, and a less accomplished quartet. Paul Verhoeven’s Hollow Man feels prescient in its updating of The Invisible Man, brushing against notions of toxic masculinity, though the directorial delight baked into proceedings perhaps undercuts any commentary. The Cell is stylised to a fault, while The Watcher is adequate at best, not really rising to its enticing prospect of a cat & mouse game between James Spader’s detective and Keanu Reeves’s killer. I jest including John Cusack’s list-keeping, ex-girlfriend-venting record store owner character in this grouping, but suspect I’d be exasperated with Stephen Frears’ film and Cusack’s characterisation today, despite enjoying High Fidelity in 2000.
The Dish, Goddess of 1967, Risk, and Better than Sex
Some titles from the Antipodean class of 2000, albeit none with the same cultural footprint as Chopper. True story The Dish comes closest and is very agreeable viewing, not to mention a quantum leap in craft for the makers of The Castle. Goddess of 1967, Risk, and Better than Sex, like so many Australian films, have fallen into obscurity and neglect, but each has virtues. The best of these three, Risk, is unavailable in any format; it’s a breezy thriller lifted by three solid leads—Bryan Brown, Claudia Karvan, Tom Long—and helmed with some panache, nodding to Jeffrey Smart’s artwork in its compositions. Both DP Simon Duggan and editor Lee Smith would soon be poached by Hollywood.
Quills, House of Mirth, and The Golden Bowl
Quills, or Sade Behaving Badly, isn’t on par with the very best of director Phillip Kaufman—The Right Stuff, The Unbeatable Lightness of Being—but on a scene to scene basis it’s very entertaining, with an energetic Geoffrey Rush performance as the incarcerated subversive Marquis and a pained performance by Joaquin Phoenix (having quite a year between this and Gladiator) trying and failing to manage and minister to him. Ostensibly a more conventional period film—adapted, like Age of Innocence, from an Edith Wharton novel—House of Mirth is impeccably made by Terence Davies and quietly devastating, with a wonderful turn from Gillian Anderson as Wharton’s ostracised heroine, quietly crumbling beneath socially-mandated pomp and poise. The Golden Bowl, another Henry James adaptation from the Merchant Ivory team, is classy and well-acted but not as impactful.
State and Main and Shadow of the Vampire
State and Main is David Mamet’s likeable ribbing of a Hollywood production besieging a small town, with some acerbic dialogue and resonant pre-MeToo potshots, though like The Player it’s never truly insightful or authentically indignant about the industry it lampoons. Shadow of the Vampire also feels like a Hollywood satire, even though it’s focused on silent German cinema and the making of Nosferatu, speculating that star Max Schreck was a real vampire discovered and cast by director F.W. Murnau. I’m not enamoured with the way this film—effectively it must be conceded—parrots its source text, treating Murnau’s career and accomplishments of secondary interest to its own postmodern indulgences, but it’s undeniably a hoot with delicious performances from John Malkovich and, especially, Willem Dafoe.
Coyote Ugly, Best in Show, Almost Famous, and The Man who Cried
Four more films that tackle showbiz in its various offshoots: pop songwriting while toiling in hospitality (Coyote Ugly), dog shows (Best in Show), music journalism, burgeoning fame, and the grind of touring (Almost Famous), and opera (The Man Who Cried). As a Jerry Bruckheimer-produced confection, a Christopher Guest mockumentary, a Cameron Crowe coming-of-age touchy-feely, and a Sally Potter art film, it’s a disparate quartet. Push come shove, I’d watch Best in Show right this minute.
Little Nicky, Bedazzled, and Meet the Parents
Three mainstream star-driven comedies with studio heft, from the last decade in which they existed, one of which (Meet the Parents) I quite like.
Miss Congeniality, Nurse Betty, and Saving Grace
Three women-centred comedies in contrast to the titles above. Miss Congeniality is predictable from top to high-heeled toe, but Sandra Bullock delivers the pratfalls and schtick well. Saving Grace is unremarkable but a likeable enough showcase for Brenda Blethyn as a widow who turns to growing pot to make ends meet, co-scripted by co-star Craig Ferguson. Nurse Betty is a delightful pivot into more mainstream—but still acerbic and gently misanthropic—waters for director Neil La Bute, with a terrific Renee Zellweger turn as a trauma victim who fixates on a soap opera doctor; like State and Main, it lands some potshots at the entertainment industry, with a welcome dash of Soapdish.
Chocolat, The Contender, Requiem for a Dream, and The Gift
Four women-centred dramas, though Chocolat, like a salted caramel, splits the difference between sweet and savoury, mostly an appealing confection but with some darkness around its edges. The Contender’s central theme—misogyny in politics—remains resonant, though its rebuttal of fighting back with stoicism and integrity seems fantastical in 2025; nonetheless, it’s a sturdy high-minded drama. Requiem for a Dream showcases compelling filmmaking and acting, albeit in service of a cranked-up Reefer Madness-style cautionary tale. Finally, The Gift once again sees Sam Raimi keeping his style in check, delivering an effective Southern Gothic thriller—penned by Billy Bob Thornton and One False Move co-scribe Tom Epperson—that conjures some atmosphere, with occasional directorial flourishes and a solid Cate Blanchett performance at its centre.
The Princess and the Warrior, The Taste of Others, and Before Night Falls
I feel very inadequate as a critic lumping “the foreign ones” together, but here we are; at least Crimson Rivers and Crouching Tiger slipped in above. Tom Tykwer’s follow-up to Run Lola Run retains its lead Franka Potente; it lacks Run Lola Run’s tautness, leanness, and high-concept engine, but is a curious character-driven thriller. The Taste of Others is a French farce about art, taste, class, relationships, and other such matters. It’s a bore, but a tastefully made one. Before Night Falls, Julian Schnabel’s follow-up to Basquiat, focuses on another counter-culture artist, Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas. It’s ultimately boilerplate and par the course for the genre, despite Schnabel’s artful direction and a breakthrough Javier Bardem performance.
The rest: The Millennium's New Groove
It seems apt to start digging into the broader sweep of 2000 with John Waters’ Cecil B. Demented and Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet, two films featuring indie filmmakers or film students bent on revenge as their titular protagonists. In Waters’ film, the object of that revenge is mainstream Hollywood, to be defeated via guerilla filmmaking activism and abducting & brainwashing, Party Hearst-style, a diva (Melanie Griffith, in sporting form). In Almereyda’s awkwardly updated Hamlet, it’s Hamlet’s uncle Claudius—who killed Hamlet’s CEO dad, took the reins of the corporation, and married Hamlet’s mum—to be ensnared through a short film re-enacting the crime. Both protagonists are products of the 80s and 90s, played by Stephen Dorf and Ethan Hawke, cinematically both products of the 80s and 90s.
Tarantino isn’t namechecked in either of these post-Tarantino works. In Waters’ film, namechecked directors include Preminger, Warhol, Anger, Fassbinder, Peckinpah, and Fuller, among others, a counter-culture genealogy to which Waters also belongs; only Lynch, Almodóvar, and Spike Lee are cited among directors actively working in the 90s. Cecil B. Demented also takes a baton from Lloyd Kaufman’s Terror Firmer, another recent indie filmmaking satire that praised Sam Fuller and took potshots at Hollywood, notably Spielberg.
No directors are cited in Hamlet, which doesn’t bend its source text to drop a Jarmusch reference, but Hamlet does wander around a video store during the ‘To be or not to be’ monologue, with The Crow: City of Angels—a very 90s revenge flick—playing on the TV screens. Hamlet also extends into the 2000s the Shakespeare movie boom of the 90s and trend for teen Shakespeare films (typically starring Julia Stiles), the lattee an offshoot of Clueless’s take on Jane Austen.
Though neither film is great, both are interesting and firmly timestamped as products of the year 2000 in their casting, roots in the 90s indie scene, and antipathy—especially Cecil B. Demented, performative as it is—towards 1990s Hollywood. Similarly timestamped are Beat, a threadbare drama about William S. Burroughs’ shooting of Joan Vollmer, featuring Kiefer Sutherland and Courtney Love as the infamous husband and wife. Ditto Spike Lee’s scathing Bamboozled and the didactic—though not unwarranted—satire it levels at racism in the entertainment industry.
Ditto What Women Want, the last time Mel Gibson could play a suave sexist ladies man who’s imbued with the power to hear women’s thoughts and harnesses said insight, first for gain but later for good. Current detractors with an aversion to Gibson wouldn’t look at this film at 50 paces to shoot it, but in its context it’s a mostly effective rom-com, with Gibson in lockstep with the material. The project also birthed a rom-com creative juggernaut in sophomore director Nancy Meyers.
While What Women Want is boilerplate to a fault, The Million Dollar Hotel—featuring Gibson as a neck-braced detective investigating a crime in an apartment building—is defiantly amorphous, director Wim Wenders assembling eclectic ingredients but disinterested in them cohering. Gibson didn’t mince words on the finished product, making me curious what drew him there in the first instance.
Among other stars toiling in 2000, two staples of Jerry Bruckheimer productions, Denzel Washington (New York Times’ Greatest Actor of the 21st Century) and Nicolas Cage, headlined Remember the Titans and Gone in 60 Seconds for the mega-producer respectively: the former was the first of many inspirational coach films issued throughout the 2000s, while the latter foreshadowed the gargantuan Fast and Furious franchise, which launched the next year. Cage also starred in millennial Capra-corn The Family Man, surprisingly thoughtfully directed by Brett Ratner. On top of the abovementioned The Perfect Storm and O Brother Where Art Thou, George Clooney directed and featured in a live remake of Fail Safe for television, impressive but lacking the gravitas and topicality of its Sidney Lumet original.
Similarly starry and stagey was Under Suspicion, headlined by Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman, and Monica Bellucci, in a sturdy and grounded redemption for director Stephen Hopkins after the weightless and wasteful Lost in Space. It’s the kind of material Michael Douglas could’ve shown up in; instead, Douglas broke his default thriller mode of the 90s with Curtis Hanson’s college dramedy Wonder Boys, and his decade would alternate between programmer thrillers (Don’t Say a Word, The Sentinel) and similar character-based work (It Runs in the Family, Solitary Man).
Sandra Bullock’s plastered face was plastered over the marketing for sobriety drama 28 Days: the film reheating ingredients better served in Clean & Sober, but Bullock effectively played against type as a less congenial character than her other 2000 hit. Kim Basinger also headlined a double bill after a post-LA Confidential hiatus: drama I Dreamed of Africa and chiller Bless the Child, neither strong.
Vin Diesel’s star was beginning to rise with Boiler Room and Pitch Black. The former is a testosterone-heavy finance thriller, the latter the rarest of animals: a taut, frugal sci-fi action chiller that efficiently sets up its high concept, sustains said concept, and introduces a quasi-classic character in Diesel’s Riddick. The film benefits from writer-director David Twohy’s Larry Cohen-esqué knack, as previously documented, for wringing maximum juice from a novel premise.
Also on the ascent was Charlize Theron, albeit playing the third wheel to male pairings: Will Smith and Matt Damon in Robert Redford’s pretty and pretty underwhelming magical realist period golf drama The Legend of Bagger Vance; Robert De Niro and Cuba Gooding Jnr’s sparring navy men—the former in tiring hard-ass This Boy’s Life mode—in the boilerplate Men of Honour; and Mark Wahlberg and Joaquin Phoenix in the first of their two onscreen pairings under the always interesting director James Gray, The Yards (the latter, We Owned the Night, followed in 2007). Gray’s film is easily the best of the three, essayed with gritty elegance and economy and his signature attention to nuance. Theron is good in all three, bringing shading to what are essentially set-dressing roles.
In lighter terrain, Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence donned fat suits—multiple suits in Murphy’s case—for sequel Nutty Professor 2: The Klumps and franchise-starter Big Momma’s House, while Jim Carrey overacts in the garish and busy The Grinch. More successful was his reunion with his Dumb & Dumber directors on the very funny Me, Myself & Irene. Jackie Chan teamed with Owen Wilson on the enjoyable Western action-comedy Shanghai Noon, both stars used to good effect, while another Hong Kong martial arts star, Jet Li, continued to make inroads into Hollywood with the Joel Silver-produced Romeo Must Die, a riff on Romeo & Juliet that, unlike Almereyda’s Hamlet, doesn’t care for textual fidelity.
Kenneth Branagh’s wartime musical adaptation of Love’s Labour’s Lost—which folds in ditties from Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, and George Gershwin—isn’t as fussy about textual fidelity as his four-hour Hamlet, but does retain a portion of the source text. Deeming Shakespeare taxing enough on his eclectic cast, he doesn’t tax them to sing and dance well, adopting the same chillaxed approach as Woody Allen on Everyone Says I Love You. In contrast, Lars Von Trier’s musical Dancer in the Dark, made in the thick of his stripped-down Dogme 95 phase, is characteristically punishing, piling miseries upon its leading lady (Björk) ala Breaking the Waves and using musical numbers for ironic feel-bad irony. Australian film Bootmen doesn’t have songs, but has some very effective tap dance numbers atop and against the industrial structures of Newcastle.
The musical would enjoy a revival with Moulin Rouge and Chicago in the coming years and spend the next quarter century on the brink of fashion, alternately hitting big and striking out. In the meantime, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Dancer in the Dark, and Bootmen were its disparate wayward offspring. Disney and DreamWorks chipped in with their traditional-animated releases The Emperor’s New Groove and The Road to El Dorado. The former film, conceived in the same earnest spirit as Pocahontas, was substantially retooled to be funnier but kept its Sting soundtrack; the latter, delivered in a classical Disney style before DreamWorks went whole hog on schtickier star-driven CGI animation, gets considerable mileage from casting Kevin Kline and Kenneth Branagh—paired to better effect here than Wild Wild West—as rapscallion chums.
A Kate Bush song initially appeared on Disney’s CGI-animated Dinosaur, but that was jettisoned from the final product. Big mistake, big, huge, as it would have been one of the few memorable things in the film, a rather plodding Prehistoric snooze after an impressive opening. Amusingly, the film was originally developed by Paul Verhoeven, whose jokes on the Robocop commentary that his beasts would have been less “benevolent”. Also less benevolent was anime Blood: The Last Vampire, while live-action Disney sequel 102 Dalmatians—a downgrade from 1996’s slap-schticky but tenuously classy “original”—at least bequeathed some expected mugging from Glenn Close and Gerard Depardieu as partners in sartorial and canine crime.
While the musical loitered in the wings, many of the genres that enjoyed the spotlight in the 90s had made their exits by 2000, though all would make sporadic returns over the next two decades: the Western, the erotic thriller, the serial killer thriller, the legal thriller and courtroom drama, etc. All genres tethered to humans, unlike the comic-book film, which mutated with Blade and X-Men from its 90s incarnation synonymous with Batman into something new for the noughties, though Batman would return AND begin.
However, the teen comedy and horror trends ignited by Clueless and Scream still chugged along, franchisable based on their affordable and renewable talent pools. Another serve of American pie would be dished out the following year, but in the meantime there were teen/young adult comedies Bring It On and Road Trip, romance Down to You, thrillers Gossip and The Skulls, and chiller Final Destination. Other horror or genre-adjacent titles included the Winona Ryder-led Lost Souls (poorly directed by Spielberg DP Janusz Kaminski), Franka Potente-led Anatomy, Dolph Lundgren-led Jill the Ripper, Ginger Snaps, Faust, Godzilla vs Megaguirus, Troma’s Citizen Toxie, and George Romero’s return after a 7-year hiatus with the solid Bruiser.
Some notable misses from directors with pedigree are Brian De Palma’s Mission to Mars and Danny Boyle’s The Beach, though both films have accomplished sequences and both directors are too interesting to produce films without value. De Palma would helm one more bona fide classic, 2002’s Femme Fatale, then artfully doodle through retreads of classics, be it transplanting Casualties of War to found footage (Redacted) or applying his fanciful Hitchcockian fromage to a remake of French film Love Crime (Passion). Boyle, meanwhile, has proven one of the greats with 28 Days Later, Sunshine, Slumdog Millionaire, 127 Hours, T2 Trainspotting etc.
While British film Billy Elliott gets a lot of love—even spinning off into a stage show—and gifted audiences the talented Jamie Bell, I find it incredibly overrated and its patronising depiction of the working class lamentable. For more sincerely felt, uncondescending father-son dynamics, see sci-fi film Frequency, with Dennis Quaid and Jim Caviezel as father and adult son communicating across time.
The Australian documentary Cunna Mulla is wretched for similar reasons to Billy Elliott: it’s struggling small town voyeurism for inner city arthouse moviegoers. Mr Accident is more agreeable: Yahoo Serious’s third and, sadly, final film is filled with offbeat visual invention, genuinely witty and artful slapstick—as opposed to the John Hughes slap-schtick popularised and then exhausted in the 90s—and an endearing lead turn from its writer-director-star, a singular, inimitable Australian original. I also don’t mind some of the Australian derivatives of 2000: Angst chasing Clerks, Sample People chasing Tarantino; Cut chasing Scream; all filtered through an Australian prism and coming out looking, feeling, and sounding somewhat different to their American brethren. Family film Selkie (about a seal) is cute, and The Monkey’s Mask (not about a monkey) has some style.
Three titles meditated on the ethnic European experience in Australia: The Wog Boy, Looking for Alibrandi, and Beware of Greeks Bearing Guns. The Wog Boy was a big hit, as writer-star Nick Giannopoulos was wont to tell everyone. The comedy is hit and miss, with fish in a barrel satirical targets and excessive mugging, but enough of the jokes land. Looking for Alibrandi is a smart and thoughtful adaptation of its source text, adding energy and spunk through quippy voiceover and a lively soundtrack combining prog rock, old school Italian ditties, and a smidgen of classical (subsequently-cancelled Matthew Newton’s entrance to Handel’s coronation anthem ‘Zadok the Priest’ doesn’t quite play the same today).
Alibrandi director Kate Woods, who’s worked entirely in television before and since, delivered a nimble feature debut with technical polish, great use of Sydney locations, and a big, outsized heart on its sleeve. Woods was AFI-nominated in the Best Director category, but lost to Andrew Dominik for Chopper. Whilst consistent with the AFI's 90s streak of awarding direction on grungy crime films (see also Kiss or Kill, The Boys, Two Hands), this feels like a dubious victory for topical grime and hip nihilism. Though its title hints in this direction, Beware of Greeks Bearing Guns is not a highly caffeinated, Guy Ritchie-esque black comedy gangster flick, but more a chamomile tea. Its thriller elements are tame, its tone gentle, and opportunities for humour (and maybe a touch of offence) via clashes between Australian and Cretan cultures go unmined. It’s fine.
One more Australian title of 2000 was Innocence, Paul Cox’s film about former lovers reuniting in their seventies. The age of the film’s protagonists imbues Innocence’s late romance with a greater vulnerability, as well as a greater sense of the collateral damage their romance causes: things get ugly and messy. The film showcases strong work from three industry veterans —Bud Tingwell and Julia Blake as the lovers, Terry Norris as Blake’s husband—who sell the shared history and sometimes tender, sometimes thorny interactions between their characters, as well as some of Cox’s more didactic ruminations on love and life.
The French dispatches of 2000 included provocative bore Baise Moi; Michael Haneke’s Code Unknown; Claude Chabrol’s Nightcap; a pair of François Ozon films in Under the Sand and Water Drops on Burning Rocks, the latter adapted from a Fassbinder script; and a rather uninvolving miniseries of Les Misérables headlined by Gerard Depardieu and John Malkovich—Musketeers reunited—suggesting that textual fidelity can sometimes be a disservice and a few songs actually go a long way. The bookending films aside, that list is a great showcase of a handful of Europe’s very best actresses: Juliette Binoche, Charlotte Rampling, Ludivine Saugnier, and Isabelle Huppert (New York Times’ Greatest Actress of the 21st Century).
Though not in that same tier, Monica Bellucci is striking and iconic, and that’s strategically harnessed in Giuseppe Tornatore’s Malena, in which she’s a proverbial big fish in a regional Italian small pond, alternately ogled and ostracised. Bette Midler is also small-town notorious, in a very different way, as the titular battle-axe of unamusing black comedy Drowning Mona.
Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu launched with Amores Perros, praised by William Friedkin in Empire as a reinvention of cinema; I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s very effective, with more than a whiff of the same anthropological eye and bluntness of Friedkin’s best. The film propelled its director into the premier league of working filmmakers, with 21 Grams, Babel, Birdman, and The Revenant to follow. A sneaker, more under-the-radar talent, Gina Prince-Bythewood, debuted with Love & Basketball, a perceptive, finely-tuned romantic drama with exceptional performances from Sanaa Lathan and Omar Epps.
Similarly, JSA: Joint Security Area—about the unlikely friendship between North and South Korean border guards and the disastrous fallout of said friendship—put Park Chan-Wook on the map, along with star Song Kang-Ho, both elevating what could have been a procedural potboiler into something vital and more profound. Meanwhile, Takashi Kitano’s Brother sees the Japanese auteur inch incrementally towards the American mainstream, with its US setting, American cast (including the abovementioned Epps), and partial English dialogue track, but it’s still very much a Kitano film.
I’ll conclude this recap of 2000 with three couplings and a single. Like Kitano, actors Steve Buscemi and Ed Harris helmed features: Buscemi his sophomore film, the prison-set Animal Factory, and Harris debuting with his Jackson Pollock biopic, efficiently titled Pollock. The latter does a nice job of recreating the Peggy Guggenheim-era art scene and depicting Pollock at work, though doesn’t elucidate any tangible insights into his troubled mind, despite Harris’s strenuous performance.
Two faith films released in 2000—the genre on the cusp of becoming its own self-sustaining industry and talent ecosystem—were biopic Bonhoeffer and Left Behind, the latter dramatizing the End Times as described in the Book of Revelation. Joel Schumacher’s Tigerland introduced Colin Farrell to audiences and depicted the gruelling training for grunts going off to Vietnam, with the director’s wilder impulses kept firmly in check, while U571 delivers a serviceable wartime submarine flick, though there are much better examples of that sub-genre.
Finally, playwright Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count On Me, introducing Mark Ruffalo and affording plum roles for Laura Linney and Matthew Broderick, is engaging, thoughtful, spikily witty human drama, its characters alternately frustrating and frail and sweet and stupid and touching. Lonergan has only directed three films, and I’ve only seen two—this and Manchester by the Sea—but both are gems, both quietly devastating.
I opened this piece with a status update on the three Mount Rushmore movie stars of the 90s, and I’ll bookend by highlighting that 2000—whilst not a spectacular year for movies and on the cusp of the death of the movie star—nonetheless sees a number of rising performers, some of whom were starting to build in the 90s, laying the foundations for their 21st century careers. Vin Diesel, Charlize Theron, Mark Wahlberg, Joaquin Phoenix, Josh Brolin, Jason Statham, Christian Bale, Javier Bardem, Renee Zellweger, Colin Farrell, Mark Ruffalo, Ryan Gosling in a tiny part in Remember the Titans: all would shape 21st century American film to some degree, and all are present in 2000, laying tracks for the next two decades. Meanwhile, cats like Robert Downey Jnr. (in Wonder Boys) and Johnny Depp (in Chocolat, The Man Who Cried), both prolific in the 90s and rolling into the 2000s with interesting but chequered filmographies and reputations, would explode (and one implode) spectacularly and unexpectedly in the ensuing years.
For the record, some notable films of 2000 that I have not included because I haven’t seen them: Our Lady of the Assassins, Keeping the Faith, Where the Heart is, Woman on Top, Hanging Up, Lucky Numbers, Scary Movie, Dude Where’s My Car, Return to Me, Loser, Centre Stage, Titan AE, Bounce, The Replacements, The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle.
Postscript
In 2001, 9-11 happens. Hollywood responded by pulling a bunch of films with NYC or terror content from the release slate and making declarations about scrapping violent movies entirely and doubling-down on feel-good films, before Training Day was released and hit big and Hollywood decided “Never mind”. Nonetheless, superheroes and escapism and IP take (strangle) hold in the 21st century, with the first Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings films released before year’s end and Spider-Man the following year: these series alone and their spin-offs have yielded, at my rough count, 28 features, excluding Spider-Man’s supporting roles in other Marvel titles.
Of the 57 films (at the time of writing) that have grossed over a billion dollars, only three are from the 20th century: Titanic, Jurassic Park, and The Phantom Menace. Billion-dollar grosses become the overriding priority of Hollywood studios over the 21st century, particularly after Avatar and the ghoulish Alice in Wonderland, to the extent that new Star Wars and Superman and Batman films—once occupants of rarefied blockbuster air—became just another Friday release. All this warps the ecosystem of the 90s lovingly chronicled throughout this series, muscling out of existence the mid-budget legal thrillers and erotic thrillers and teen movies and rom-coms and com-coms and surprise hits like Home Alone and Pretty Woman and Ghost and Austin Powers and Scream and The Sixth Sense that were part of the 90s tapestry.
Only one Spielberg film occupies that billion-dollar list, Jurassic Park; while hardly irrelevant, his mantle as name event filmmaker has been taken on by the likes of Christopher Nolan, Greta Gerwig, and Jordan Peele. The exciting class of 1999 never quite impacted the mainstream to the same degree that Coppola and Scorsese did in the 70s, but certainly diffused across American film over the next quarter century: Sofia Coppola and David O Russell with 7 more films apiece, Spike Jonze a further 3 films, Paul Thomas Anderson another 6 films (and, for good measure, Paul W.S. Anderson another 10 films). In contrast, putting these whipper-snapper layabouts to shame, Clint Eastwood and Woody Allen—ageing writer-directors supposedly in their twilight in 2000—would make a further 18 and 20 films respectively, including some of their very best, until finally thwarted by David Zaslav or finite cancellation.
The last quarter century has yielded the Frat Pack, the Splat Pack, found footage and prestige horror, Mumblecore, Iraq War dramas, 9-11 recreations both literal and metaphorical, J-Horror, a flourishing of First Nations films in Australia, and a spectacular boom in South Korean film, among other trends. The latter culminated in the historic Best Picture Oscar win of Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite, in a Best Picture race that expanded to 10 nominated titles in the 2010s, enabling such cultural touchstones as Philomena and Extremely Loud & Incredible Close to compete. Women directors—Kathryn Bigelow, Jane Campion, Chloe Zhao—have also finally started winning Oscars, the latter two post-pandemic. Speaking of which, the pandemic, in tandem with the purported death of physical media and ascendancy of social media, streaming services like Netflix, and binge television/content, has further decimated cinema in its traditional sense and reshaped what gets made, how it’s made, and where and how it is watched.
All that, and much more, is for another (and someone else’s) series. Thanks for reading.
Post-Postscript
In the interest of completism, some previously flagged 1990s gaps were plugged while the series unfolded: Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael (1990), which has a charming lead turn from Winona Ryder but not much else to recommend it; Frankie & Johnnie (1991), which probably doesn’t pass the MeToo smell test but is thoughtfully directed by Gary Marshall and acted by Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer; When a Man Loves a Woman (1994), a romantic drama about an alcoholic wife (Meg Ryan) and her long-suffering but complicit husband (Andy Garcia), adding enough wrinkles to formula to engage; Escape from Absolom (1994), a futuristic jungle prison survival thriller, with better-than-deserved direction by focused journeyman Martin Campbell and a very 90s manly ensemble including Ray Liotta (in a very rare action lead), Lance Henriksen, Stuart Wilson, Ernie Hudson, and Kevin Dillion; and Ted Demme’s The Ref (1994), a black comedy that feels rather toothless for all its acidity and the unlikeliest of Simpson-Bruckheimer productions.