Kevin Costner’s reassuring screen presence gets a wonderfully nasty workout in Mr. Brooks, where the respectable family man is also the person you should lock your doors against. William Hurt plays his murderous urges as an amused companion, turning internal conflict into disturbingly convivial conversation. Their chemistry is the main attraction: these two discuss appalling decisions with the comfortable rhythm of colleagues deciding where to have lunch. | © MGM
The smartest decision 8 Mile makes is letting Eminem lose his nerve. B-Rabbit can write, but standing in front of a hostile crowd requires something his notebook cannot supply. Curtis Hanson gives the factory shifts, unreliable transport, and cramped living arrangements enough weight to make that distinction matter. When the final rap battles arrive, the pleasure comes from watching someone finally stop handing other people ammunition against him. | © Universal Pictures
Watch Tommy Lee Jones’s face as his character’s faith in military discipline begins to fail him. Playing a retired military investigator searching for his missing son, he makes each discovery feel like something physically difficult to swallow. In the Valley of Elah follows the procedures of a murder mystery, but its most painful investigation concerns a father’s assumptions about the institution he trusted to bring his boy home. | © Warner Independent Pictures
Before picking up anything particularly heavy, David Dunn has to entertain the possibility that his life means more than he thought. Bruce Willis makes that prospect look almost as frightening as the train crash he survives. Unbreakable builds its superhero story around a troubled marriage, a son’s belief, and Samuel L. Jackson’s persuasive certainty. Knowing the destination makes the conversations more loaded, while the melancholy remains surprisingly difficult to shake. | © Touchstone Pictures
A vocabulary lesson should be a fairly harmless way to open a movie. In Dogtooth, it establishes that even the dictionary belongs to the people running the prison. Yorgos Lanthimos films this isolated family’s invented reality with a composure that makes its absurdities horribly plausible. Returning to it, you notice how thoroughly parental authority has contaminated ordinary gestures; even a dance becomes an alarming negotiation between obedience and self-expression. | © Kino Lorber
Somewhere between opening coconuts and arguing with sporting equipment, Cast Away persuades you to recalibrate what counts as an achievement. Making fire deserves a standing ovation. Tom Hanks gives Chuck Noland’s practical struggles enough frustration and ingenuity to sustain those long stretches alone, but the return to civilization complicates the apparent victory. Surviving the island cannot restore the years he lost, or oblige anyone else’s life to have stood still. | © 20th Century Fox
Leonardo DiCaprio gets the swagger, but Djimon Hounsou gives Blood Diamond its strongest reason to keep watching. His Solomon Vandy wants his family back; Danny Archer sees a precious stone as his ticket out. That imbalance keeps their partnership tense even when the action follows familiar routes. Amid the gunfire and bargaining, Hounsou makes a father’s refusal to abandon his son feel more urgent than any fortune buried underground. | © Warner Bros. Pictures
Would you challenge Alonzo Harris immediately, or spend an embarrassing amount of time hoping he knew what he was doing? Denzel Washington makes that question uncomfortable in Training Day, giving corruption the confidence and charisma of excellent career advice. Ethan Hawke’s anxious watchfulness provides the necessary resistance. On another viewing, apparently casual encounters acquire sharper meaning, exposing how carefully Alonzo manages the day while pretending to improvise a rookie’s education. | © Warner Bros. Pictures
Everybody in Snatch thinks they understand the arrangement, which is usually the first sign that the arrangement is about to become somebody’s funeral. Guy Ritchie threads a stolen diamond through crooked boxing and spectacularly unreliable criminals, with Jason Statham providing an increasingly exasperated center. Brad Pitt’s Mickey attracts the attention, but repeat viewings reward the supporting players: every pause, misunderstanding, and terrible business decision contributes to the beautifully timed pileup. | © Sony Pictures Releasing
Knowing the central revelation changes where you look in A Beautiful Mind. Conversations that initially seem straightforward become exercises in perspective, while Russell Crowe’s guarded physicality takes on additional significance. Ron Howard’s heavily dramatized account of mathematician John Nash is most affecting when it settles into the difficult business of living with uncertainty. Jennifer Connelly supplies essential friction, allowing love to include exhaustion and fear rather than an inexhaustible supply of reassurance. | © Universal Pictures
Even the colors in The Aviator are performing: Martin Scorsese and cinematographer Robert Richardson recreate early color processes to place Howard Hughes inside the visual language of his era. Beneath that gorgeous surface, Leonardo DiCaprio plays a man whose expanding opportunities coexist with increasingly restrictive compulsions. The lavish filmmaking and aviation sequences supply the spectacle, while a repeated phrase can suddenly make all that money and apparent freedom feel useless. | © Miramax Films
Music becomes painfully inaccessible in The Pianist: the skill that defines Władysław Szpilman cannot simply protect him from the destruction of his world. Adrien Brody’s performance gradually contracts into watchfulness, hunger, and the effort required to remain unnoticed. Returning to the film brings its precarious encounters into sharper focus. Survival depends on chance and other people’s decisions, without any reassuring promise that talent, decency, or endurance will be enough. | © Focus Features
Daniel Day-Lewis can make a polite conversation feel like the preliminary stage of a stabbing. His Bill the Butcher dominates Gangs of New York, but look beyond that magnificent menace and the frame keeps offering competing attractions: crowded tenements, political theater, and a city apparently assembled from combustible grievances. Scorsese’s historical epic grows more interesting when the revenge plot shares your attention with the machinery that turns prejudice into power. | © Miramax Films
For all the forged checks and immaculate uniforms, the Christmas phone calls might be the best reason to revisit Catch Me If You Can. They reveal how lonely Spielberg’s glamorous chase has become for the young man supposedly enjoying it. Leonardo DiCaprio supplies the nerve and improvisation, while Tom Hanks offers wonderfully unglamorous persistence. Christopher Walken’s wounded paternal pride helps explain why every successful impersonation still leaves Frank wanting something else. | © DreamWorks Pictures
The opening stretch of There Will Be Blood makes hard labor so tangible that Daniel Plainview’s eventual salesmanship feels like another tool he has learned to wield. Daniel Day-Lewis moves between reassuring hospitality and naked contempt with terrifying precision, meeting a slippery opponent in Paul Dano’s preacher. Listen to how both men address an audience: beneath their feud lies an ugly recognition that each understands the other’s methods rather well. | © Paramount Vantage
Rewatching a favorite movie from the 2000s can be a risky business: sometimes you discover that your teenage taste deserves a little scrutiny. Other times, you catch a performance, a throwaway joke, or a carefully planted clue that you completely missed back then. These 15 near-perfect 2000s movies reward that second look. A few rough edges survive, but so do the reasons you spent years telling people to watch them.
