More than 5,000 movies were released in the decade between 2000 and 2009, and some Fridays, it seemed like most of them were Saw sequels.

That was probably just an illusion. The Aughts (as opposed to the Ought Nots) were actually a good time for films, a time when we met Harry Potter and Jason Bourne, when Martin Scorsese and the Coen Brothers got their Best Picture Oscars, when we put on our new 3-D glasses and - despite complaints from some crabby quarters - witnessed movie magic exploding around us.

Most of it was forgettable, at least to those who remained untraumatized by the Pink Panther remakes, but some of it was classic. Sifting through the thousands of movies he saw and reviewed in the past decade, Canwest film writer Jay Stone has come up with a list of the Top 5 of the 2000s.

1. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee, 2000):

"An astonishing movie, a melodrama of passion and loss that literally lifts you into the skies," I wrote at the time.

"A story of warriors and lovers, it reinvents the action genre with spring-loaded fight sequences that send its mystical warriors running up walls, bounding across roofs and, in one rapturous sequence, floating in the treetops of a bamboo forest. The drums pound, your heart ricochets, and you put aside all thoughts of gravity or earthbound sensibility: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is like watching movies for the first time, when the sorcery of an invented life held you spellbound in the dark."

Starring Chow Yun-Fat and Michelle Yeoh and based on a pulp novel, it tells the story of two sets of lovers in ancient China. Their stories, alternately tender and bold, are wrapped in an action film that introduced Western audiences to the concept of fighters who can fly through the air, a soaring symbol for the excitement of its themes.

2. A History of Violence (David Cronenberg, 2005):

Part western, part film noir, and part revenge fantasy, Cronenberg's thrilling, disturbing film has grown with time.

It stars Viggo Mortensen as an average man in a small American town who interrupts a violent crime, and is then heralded as a hero and - in the blast of publicity - apparently mistaken for a man with a violent past. A multilayered masterpiece, it finds echoes of the culture of intimidation in a bullied schoolboy or a wife (Maria Bello) who is surprised and excited by her suddenly dominating husband.

Cronenberg wants us to think about the horror of violence, but also about our own enjoyment of it on screen: When Mortensen's character faces down a criminal (Ed Harris) or has his showdown with his own brother (William Hurt), we become complicit in a classic tale of good vs. evil, but with a unique darkness at its heart.

3. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (Peter Jackson, 2001, 2002 and 2003):

J.R.R. Tolkien's heroically complex fantasy world was brought to the screen in three long films that did the impossible: They captured not only the spirit of the books, but also the look and feeling of them. It was as if director Peter Jackson had entered not only Tolkien's mind, but also the reader's.

The stories themselves are epics of religious symbolism and quest mythology, and the films rumble with the excitement of ingenious battle scenes. But they also capture the tenderness and the humanity of the characters, even those who aren't human: poor, obsessed Gollum; heroic Frodo; dashing Legolas.

The Lord of the Rings was a stunning accomplishment that remains a unique experience: more coherent than the Star Wars cycle, vaster than Harry Potter, more visceral than such pretenders as The Golden Compass or The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.

4. Atanarjuat, The Fast Runner (Zacharias Kunuk, 2001):

"A movie of such a vast landscape, of such exotic ritual, of such a broad canvas of ice and snow and hate and revenge, that it almost amounts to an entire movie genre of its own," I wrote at the time.

Inuit filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk - who showed the movie at the Cannes Film Festival, a breakthrough for Inuit cinema - retells a legend about a feud between two men over a woman. Three hours long, it unfolds at a stately pace that allows room for all the details of ancient Arctic life: the snowglasses made of bone, the meals of raw bird or uncooked caribou, the nights huddled together in an igloo.

Natar Ungalaaq plays the hero, who has a memorable naked run across the snow in one of the great scenes in Canadian film history. But it's the movie's scope, its Shakespearean ambitions, that make it timeless.

5. United 93 (Paul Greengrass, 2006):

A harrowing re-creation of the defining moment of the decade: 9/11. Paul Greengrass expertly re-creates what happened on that day on United Flight 93, leaving Newark, N.J., bound for San Francisco. It actually came down in a field in Pennsylvania, killing all 40 passengers and crew and four terrorists on board.

Using a cast of unknowns and non-professionals, Greengrass lets the drama unfold in real time: starting with a man praying softly in Arabic and moving to the plane, where we see people chatting or eating breakfast. We wait in tense expectation, hoping for an escape hatch that is not there.

"Relentless, anxious, unsparing, raw," I wrote at the time. "It is not sentimental. It is not redemptive. It does not try to explain, or to excuse, or condemn. It is designed as a tale of heroism, but we understand it as a tale of terror. It begins with a scene of a man praying softly. We don't know how it ends."

Jay's Honourable Mentions:

Far From Heaven

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Requiem for a Dream

Memento

WALL-E

Sideways

No Country for Old Men

4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days

Brokeback Mountain

The Bourne Trilogy