Films released between 2000 and 2009, when digital effects stopped being a special occasion and became the default, and the franchise became the unit of production, not the film. The reviews here cover the decade the superhero picture turned serious, the ring of prestige television began pulling talent away, and practical effects survived mainly as a deliberate choice instead of a necessity.
2000sSeptember 11, 2026
Dark Blue (2002) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Kurt Russell plays a third-generation LAPD officer who plants evidence as a matter of routine, set in the week before the Rodney King verdict. James Ellroy wrote the…
2000sSeptember 11, 2026
Brokeback Mountain (2005) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Two men herd sheep on a Wyoming mountain in 1963 and spend the next twenty years failing to have a life. Ang Lee won Best Director and the…
2000sSeptember 11, 2026
Precious (2009) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A sixteen-year-old in Harlem in 1987 is transferred to an alternative school and learns to read. Gabourey Sidibe had never acted and Mo'Nique won Supporting Actress for a performance…
2000sSeptember 11, 2026
Star Trek: Enterprise rates 4 for its first two seasons and 8 for its last two. A completely mixed bag that spent two years not knowing what it was, committed to a serialized arc in season three, became the show…
2000sSeptember 11, 2026
The Blind Side (2009) rates 4 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A competently made film in which a wealthy white family takes in a homeless Black teenager, told almost entirely from the family's position, and Sandra Bullock won…
2000sSeptember 11, 2026
Erin Brockovich (2000) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Soderbergh made a genuinely good film about a paralegal assembling six hundred plaintiffs against a utility company, and Julia Roberts won Best Actress over Ellen Burstyn in Requiem…
2000sSeptember 11, 2026
Crash (2005) rates 4 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Paul Haggis assembled a multi-strand Los Angeles film in which every character holds one racial attitude the plot then corrects, won Best Picture over Brokeback Mountain, and has spent…
2000sSeptember 11, 2026
Traffic (2000) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Soderbergh shot three parallel drug war narratives himself, gave each one a different film stock, and won Best Director while the film lost Best Picture to Gladiator. Benicio del…
2000sSeptember 11, 2026
Dexter's pilot rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A blood spatter analyst who kills murderers in his spare time, narrating his own emptiness in voiceover, introduced in an hour that is considerably sharper than the eight seasons…
2000sSeptember 11, 2026
The Henry Darius crossover rates 6 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Two episodes on two shows across two nights, bridged by a killer whose defining trait is that he moves. The premise is genuinely well engineered and the…
2000sSeptember 11, 2026
Monster (2003) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Charlize Theron gained weight, wore prosthetic teeth and won an Academy Award, and the performance underneath all of that is better than the transformation it became famous for. The…
2000sSeptember 11, 2026
The CSI Trilogy rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Three separately produced network shows ran one continuing investigation across three consecutive nights in 2009, with three production teams, three visual styles and one case. Nobody has attempted…
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