20 Underrated Movies From 2000 You've Probably Never Seen

2. Amores Perros

Released: 16th June 2000 (Mexico)

Visionary Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu may have won a pair of back-to-back Best Director Oscars in recent years, but he has rarely been better than the vibrant, violent world of his breakthrough debut feature.

The movie is a Pulp Fiction-style triptych of different stories cutting across class divides in Mexico City. A young man (star in the making Gael Garcia Bernal) is in love with his brother's wife and tries to make the money to run away with her through dogfighting. A model loses her own dog beneath the floorboards and destroys her leg and thus her career rescuing it. A vagrant hitman cares for mongrel dogs and tries to reconnect with his daughter. All of these threads come literally crashing together in a car accident that is the movie's centrepiece.

Everything is filled with an intense vibrancy, savage violence and emotional intensity. Iñárritu would use the same multi-stranded story structure for his more meditative follow-up 21 Grams, his English-language debut, but rarely again would he make anything with this raw energy.

Anyone who admired the director's work on The Revanant would do well to go back and see where it all began for him.