Requiem For A Dream, USA, 2000, 102 min. Starring Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly, Marlon Wayans, Ellen Burstyn. Directed by Darren Aronofsky. There have been plenty of films that have attempted to depict the pain and struggle of the hardcore drug addict, but this may be the first that takes the viewer directly into the addict's mind. Aronofsky's second feature utilizes the hyper-kinetic visuals of his debut feature PI and marries them to Hubert Selby's fierce novel (adapted by Selby with the director), further enhanced by some gutsy performances, particularly Burstyn's justifiably acclaimed turn as a lonely matron hooked on diet pills.

Before Night Falls, USA, 2000, 133 min. Starring Javier Bardem, Olivier Martinez, Johnny Depp, Sean Penn. Directed by Julian Schnabel. Painter Schnabel takes for his second feature the life of gay Cuban novelist/poet Reynaldo Arenas and his struggles both to create and to live the life he chose despite considerable opposition from both social and political standpoints. The idea of someone who works primarily in visuals making a film about someone whose chief mode of expression was verbal might seem like a tricky proposition, but Schnabel pulls it off, conveying the complexities of Arenas's life and his art, and how the two intertwined.

Shadow Of The Vampire, UK-USA-Luxembourg, 2000, 92 min. Starring John Malkovich, Willem Dafoe, Udo Kier, Cary Elwes, Catherine McCormack. Directed by E. Elias Merhige. Absolutely wonderful mix of drama, comedy and horror re-imagines the making of one of our other Quintessential Cinema picks, F. W. Murnau's 1922 vampire masterpiece Nosferatu, by positing that Max Schreck wasn't an actor, but a real vampire, and that Murnau got him into the film by promising him the lead actress as a post-production snack. The movie has tons of fun with the aesthetic trappings of the silent film genre – its moodiness, its hamminess – not to mention staging incredible recreations of the original and cementing it all with a solid story all its own.

Dancer In The Dark, Denmark-Germany-Netherlands -USA-UK-France- Sweden-Finland-Iceland-Norway, 2000, 140 min. Starring Björk, Catherine Deneuve, David Morse. Directed by Lars von Trier. Icelandic singer Björk plays an Eastern European woman living in America who is slowly losing her eyesight due to a degenerative disorder. She works desperately at a factory job in order to save enough money so that her son might get an operation and be spared a similar fate, and finds escape from the drudgery of her life by imagining herself in the middle of Berkeley-esque musical numbers. Von Trier sets aside the Dogma '95 rules to make this truly unique film that pays homage to the musical genre, and yet is quite definitively the work of the man who brought us such staggering, challenging work as The Element of Crime, Zentropa and Breaking the Waves.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hong Kong-Taiwan-USA, 2000, 119 min. Starring Chow Yun-Fat, Michelle Yeoh, Zhang Ziyi. Directed by Ang Lee. Sweeping story ostensibly about the search for a legendary sword that has been stolen, though that's really something of a MacGuffin, as the heart of the film belongs to the unspoken, never consummated love affair between Yun-Fat and Yeoh's warrior characters, which spans the years and faces considerable obstacles. Director Lee had already proven himself adept at western-style filmmaking with such offerings as 1997's The Ice Storm when he dazzled the film community with this return to his eastern roots, a stunning combination of adventure, fantasy, romance, and martial arts buoyed by the now-oft-imitated wirework.