'Borat' (2006)

Twenty years from now, will Sacha Baron Cohen's game-changing comedy be looked on as a watershed or a curiosity? I don't know the answer, but I do know that no other movie convulsed me so completely (even if Brüno took some of the glow off Baron Cohen's accomplishment).  But Borat, which succeeded in offending practically everybody, was the perfect movie for our reality-TV-obsessed decade, and Baron Cohen a daredevil satirist who risked all in the service of a very pointed laugh. Comedy took a decided downward turn in the new century, with Hollywood catering to the dirty-minded adolescent mind, but Judd Apatow was a happy exception. With Knocked Up and The 40-Year-Old Virgin, he combined raunch with feeling and explored the nerdish male psyche with wonderful insight. Curtis Hanson mixed comedy and drama to delicious effect in Wonder Boys; Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze brought comedy into the postmodern era with Adaptation (not to mention Michel Gondry's more serious Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), and for pure-feel good fun I'd nominate The School of Rock, Little Miss Sunshine, and the hilarious Tropic Thunder.