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Earlier this year, on the A-List, I made plenty of enemies by revealing some movies that I consider vastly overrated. It wouldn't be a solid way to end out the year by getting those of you who didn't have any qualms with my overrated movies to wonder about my sanity, by taking a look at some of the more underrated movies of the past decade. Like the past two sets of A-Lists (the best movies and TV shows of the past decade), this one is yet another two-part column. Nothing says the end of the year like excess, so why not pile on a list or two?

Something important here to note is that this is, like my other lists, representing my opinion only, and not anywhere near an exhaustive list. I've decided to split the two lists of movies here by years; this week, we'll look at movies from 2000-2004 and movies from 2005-2009, with one movie for each year. That, of course, doesn't mean that there weren't more underrated movies in these years; the films listed here are my choices for the most criminally underrated in their years. You, of course, may disagree with some of my choices, but such is life. We've all got different opinions, so feel free to share yours, whether they're in agreement, disagreement, or some of your own underrated picks.

Though it's not officially a list of honorable mentions, I wanted to throw out the names of a few other films that would fit on a list of underrated movies. Some of these films include A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Road to Perdition, The Man Who Wasn't There, Birth, Spartan, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, The Proposition, Punch-Drunk Love, Frequency, Stardust, Idiocracy, and Moon. The list could go on, but if that were the case, this entire article might amount to just listing out various movies. Let's not waste any more time and get to my list of underrated movies for the years 2000-2004.

2000: Unbreakable

Think back, if you can, and don't hurt yourself trying to do so, to when M. Night Shyamalan was not considered a joke of a director. Now, that may seem harsh to you, but this decade has not been kind to Mr. Shyamalan. In 2004, he made The Village, which was a laughably bad mess. In 2006, there was Lady in the Water, which would have been laughably bad had it not been so arrogant (or did you forget the idea that Shymalan cast himself as a writer whose work was so important that it would change the world?). Last year, Shyamalan outdid himself with The Happening, a movie that I cannot wait to watch again, as long as I am drinking hard liquor and shouting things at my TV screen. But, before all of that, there was a trifecta of greatness: The Sixth Sense, Signs, and in between, the dark superhero drama Unbreakable.

Starring Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson, and Robin Wright Penn, Unbreakable is a fascinating meditation on what it means to be given superhuman powers, and how a normal man has to deal with these changes. The plot's simple: Willis plays a pensive and unsure father with a marriage that's barely hanging on; at the beginning of the film, the train he's on gets into a crash and only he survives. More than that, he's completely unharmed. Somehow, as he's made to realize by Jackson's always-sick mentor of sorts, he's never been sick and can withstand pretty much anything. Unbreakable was meant to be the first film in a trilogy of superhero films, as is made obvious by the film's final twist. Though it's not a perfect film (the coda, which is a very quick explanation of what happens after the film ends, should have been nixed), it's a beautiful film to look at with some brilliant performances and sequences. A quick shout-out here to the cinematography, courtesy of Eduardo Serra, who was snubbed of an Oscar for the constantly moving widescreen camerawork. Shyamalan's never been better or more understated than in this film.

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