1. Funny People
Judd Apatow presented his best and most misunderstood film with Funny People. He chose his friend, Adam Sandler, to take the lead role and play a self centered comedian facing death and eternal loneliness when he is diagnosed with a terminal illness. Adam Sandler is essentially playing a hypothetical version of himself, but he does it perfectly. He plays a man longing for everything he isn't and doesn't have, a man handed a tragic future forcing him to look back at a regrettable past. Sandler is likable in all of his films. In Funny People, he is not. He is merely understandable. Sandler never uses his movie star charm here to make himself likable either. He simply plays the character to a t. Sometimes he's egotistical, sometimes he's hateful, sometimes he's sad, mad, lonely. Whatever the character required, Sandler was there to perform it perfectly. The only aspect to the character that he needed to pull off, which not many other actors could have done, was empathy. The script never asks you to feel bad for the dying comedian or even to like him. It merely asks you to understand his struggle with happiness, friendship, love and life on some level. I can't imagine any actor except Adam Sandler ever pulling this fantastic role off.