On Movies: My Favorite Movies from the 2000s

Well, Dear Reader, having covered my favorite movies from the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, we have reached “the turn of the century” and the 2000s, otherwise known as the “two thousands,” the “oh-ohs,” or the “double aughts.”

Turning again to that most useful visual aid – the colorful pie chart on my Blu-ray.com account’s My Collection statistics page – we see that of all the decades from which I have movies on Blu-ray discs, the 2000s get the biggest “slice”: 24.1% of the titles in my Blu-ray collection were produced and released between 2000 and 2009.

The 2000s were the last decade in which I went to the movies at least three or four times a year; by the beginning of the 21^st Century, many of my friends with whom I had gone to see Raiders of the Lost Ark, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, or Working Girl in the ‘80s, and The Hunt for Red October and Apollo 13 in the ‘90s weren’t always available for a movie outing in the ‘00s. Some of my friends got married and were busy with their new families. Others left Miami to seek their fortunes in other states. And, sadly, some of them died. So even when I went to theaters to see, say, Black Hawk Down or We Were Soldiers, I often rode the bus to the now-closed AMC 14 Theater at the Mall of the Americas.

As a result, I saw most of the movies from this time period exclusively on home media, reversing the pattern I established when I started buying VHS tapes in the 1980s and DVDs in the late 1990s. As I look at the list of 2000s films in my collection, I watched 17 of some 55 theatrically-released titles in theaters between January 1, 2000 and December 31, 2009.

Well, enough chit-chat – let’s get on with My Favorite Movies from the 2000s!

1. Gladiator (2000)
2. Thirteen Days (2000)
3. A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001)
4. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
5. Black Hawk Down (2001)
6. The Sum of All Fears (2002)
7. Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002)
8. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)
9. We Were Soldiers (2002)
10. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003)
11. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)
12. The Bourne Supremacy (2004)
13. Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (2005)^[1]
14. Batman Begins (2005)
15. War of the Worlds (2005)
16. The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005)
17. United 93 (2006)
18. The Holiday (2006)
19. Flags of Our Fathers (2006)^[2]
20. Letters from Iwo Jima (2006)
21. The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)
22. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)
23. The Dark Knight (2008
24. Star Trek (2009)
25. Up (2009)

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[1] This was the last film that my mother and I saw together in a movie theater. By 2005, her health was in decline and she was suffering from various ailments. We only got to see Revenge of the Sith on Opening Day because two of our then-neighbors, Ivan Kivitt and Daniel Mason, invited us to go with them.

[2] Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima are two halves of Clint Eastwood’s Iwo Jima duology.