Amélie

Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amélie (Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain) opened in 2001 and became one of the most internationally successful French films of the decade, a $174 million worldwide gross, five Césars including Best Film and Best Director, four Academy Award nominations including Best Foreign Language Film. The film made Audrey Tautou a global star and established the Jeunet visual-and-tonal register (saturated colours, whimsical magical realism, intricate chains of small consequence) that would define his subsequent work.

Amélie Poulain (Tautou, in a star-launching performance), a shy waitress at the Café des 2 Moulins in Montmartre, finds an old tin box of childhood treasures behind the wall of her apartment and decides (having successfully reunited the box with its now-elderly owner) to spend her life secretly improving those of the lonely Parisians around her. Mathieu Kassovitz plays Nino Quincampoix, the man who collects discarded passport-photo strips from the Gare du Nord, with whom Amélie falls in love.

Bruno Delbonnel's photography (his first major collaboration with Jeunet), Yann Tiersen's accordion-driven score, and the almost-cubist editing produced a Paris that was widely criticised at the time as artificially clean and ethnically narrow, and equally widely loved as the most charming sustained vision of the city in modern cinema. The film's commercial reach has been extraordinary; the score alone has remained ubiquitous in European hospitality and tourism for over twenty years.