The 40-Year-Old Virgin

The idea started as a sketch Steve Carell had created with The Second City: a middle-aged man desperately hiding a secret. Judd Apatow, who'd seen what Carell could do in Anchorman (2004), picked it as his first film as director, and the two co-wrote the script — Carell as Andy Stitzer, a gentle electronics-store clerk whose poker-night confession sets his coworkers (Paul Rudd, Romany Malco, Seth Rogen) on a mission to fix his forty-year dry spell, while Andy slowly falls for Catherine Keener's Trish instead.

It opened on August 19, 2005, and became the sleeper hit of the summer, grossing $177.4 million worldwide against a $26 million budget. The chest-waxing scene was exactly as real as it looked: Carell insisted on an actual wax, telling Apatow "it won't be as funny if it's mocked up or if it's a special effect," and the horrified profanity — including the immortal "Kelly Clarkson!" — has the ring of truth because it is. Critics embraced it too, an R-rated comedy that was somehow the sweetest movie of the year; Roger Ebert wrote that "the more you think about it, the better The 40-Year-Old Virgin gets."

What it kicked off mattered as much as the movie itself. Apatow's improvisational, heartfelt-raunch formula became the dominant comedy style of the decade — Knocked Up and Superbad followed within two years — and Carell, who became Michael Scott on The Office that same year, was suddenly the biggest comedy star in America. Writers Guild members later ranked the screenplay among the 101 greatest of the 21st century, which is a strange and wonderful fate for a movie about an action-figure collector learning to ride a bike.