2010s

A last-minute entry, this David O. Russell black comedy was like no other, and it blew everyone away.

You tend to forget that the world’s most popular musical began as a concept album with music by Claude-Michel Schönberg and lyrics by Alain Boublil and Jean-Marc Nate, sung in French. When it premiered as a performance piece in Paris in 1980 it played only three months, and was then forgotten.

In 1979, at the beginning of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, in the waning days of the Jimmy Carter presidency, the American embassy in Tehran was stormed and many Americans were taken hostage. The CIA was ordered to get them out of the country, and agent Tony Mendez devised a daring plan: create a phony film project (“Argo”) to be shot in Iran and smuggle the Americans out as its production crew.

In The Descendants, Matt King (George Clooney) is a Honolulu-based attorney and the sole trustee of a family trust of 25,000 pristine acres on Kauai. The land has great monetary value but is also a family legacy.

There never was a movie like The Artist. A French movie without dialogue, it became an immediate success when first shown at the Cannes Film Festival, and after that, there was no stopping it.

Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg did not participate in nor authorize The Social Network, the film about his entrepreneurial success and the origins of Facebook, and yet, since its release, David Fincher's movie has been cited as inspiring even more start-ups and social media. The film recounts the days back in 2003 when Harvard student Zuckerberg created the social networking site that was known first as “The Face Book”.

It had some laughs, but it was an emotional tidal wave with some of the best acting you’re likely to see in any film. It was the first mainstream movie to show a married lesbian couple raising two teenagers.

Todd Phillips’s surprise hit wasn’t supposed to make it to the big leagues. It faced two terrific Meryl Streep comedies, Julie & Julia and It’s Complicated, Marc Webb’s much loved (500) Days of Summer and Rob Marshall’s follow up to his award-winning Chicago, the Broadway musical Nine.

Avatar was the first movie to be shot with a 3D camera, released in 3D and in IMAX 3D, to win the Golden Globe for Best Film and to be nominated in the same category at the Academy Awards. The film was 40% live-action and 60% photo-realistic CGI, including a massive amount of motion-capture performance.