ZMovie

Four years of films

ZMovie is an English guide to 156 films released from 2010 to 2013. The idea comes from the old site itself: in the spring of 2013, beside its A to Z bar of movie titles, zmovie.tv carried a small Year box with just four links, 10 / 11 / 12 / 13, and its cards gave each film a Rate line as a percentage, such as Rate: 89%. This guide takes those four years and splits each into three shelves: action and adventure, comedy and animation, drama and thrillers. Each shelf holds the thirteen most voted films of its year and kind on TMDB, so the guide follows the films that people of the early 2010s watched most. Every film has an English synopsis, the cast, the director, the genres and a Watch now button that opens it on JustWatch, which shows where it can be watched in your country.

The 156 films carry about 1,706,700 votes on TMDB, with an average rating of 7.04, and twelve of them reach a rating of 8 or more. The most voted film of the guide is Inception, of 2010, by Christopher Nolan, with about 40,500 votes, just ahead of The Avengers, of 2012, and it is also the best rated, with an 8.4, or Rate: 84% in the language of the old site. The guide Start with ZMovie picks a few films from each year for a first evening, and the guide How the shelves work sets out the rules.

The four years

Each year is a family of three shelves and 39 films. Films of 2010 holds about 400,300 votes, with an average rating of 7.11, the best of the four years, and the guide Films of 2010 sums it up. Films of 2011 holds about 396,000 votes, with an average of 7.01, and the guide Films of 2011 sums it up. Films of 2012 holds about 457,700 votes, the most of the four years, with an average of 7.05, and the guide Films of 2012 sums it up, and Films of 2013 holds about 452,700 votes, with an average of 6.99, and the guide Films of 2013 sums it up.

These were the years when the superhero film took over the box office, from Iron Man 2 to The Avengers and Iron Man 3, when the great young-adult sagas reached their end, with the last Harry Potter and Twilight films and the first Hunger Games, and when animation gave Hollywood some of its biggest hits, from Toy Story 3 and Despicable Me to Frozen. They were also the years of The King's Speech, Argo and 12 Years a Slave, three winners of the Academy Award for best picture that sit on the drama shelves.

How the shelves work

Each film goes to one of three shelves by its genres on TMDB. Every animated film goes to comedy and animation, whatever its other genres, so How to Train Your Dragon, Brave and Rango sit beside Ted and The Hangover Part II. Every other film with action among its genres goes to action and adventure, together with the films whose first genre is adventure, fantasy, science fiction, war or western, so the shelf holds Kick-Ass, 21 Jump Street and Gravity as well as the superheroes. The films whose first genre is comedy, family, romance or music go to comedy and animation, and the films whose first genre is drama, thriller, crime, horror, mystery or history go to drama and thrillers. One film was moved by hand: Midnight in Paris, listed first as fantasy, sits with the comedies, where it belongs.

The Rate line of each card turns the TMDB rating into a percentage, as the old site did with its own votes: a rating of 7.8 becomes Rate: 78%. The highest of the guide is Inception, with Rate: 84%, and the lowest is Bad Teacher, of 2011, with Rate: 56%.

Three more lists

Three more lists cut across the four years. Rated 8 or more gathers the twelve films rated 8 or more on TMDB, best first, from Inception and The Intouchables to The Wolf of Wall Street and Flipped. Animated films gathers the 23 animated films of the guide in order of release, from How to Train Your Dragon and Shrek Forever After to Frozen, and Beyond Hollywood gathers the six films in other languages than English: three in French, Incendies, The Intouchables and Blue Is the Warmest Color, one in Spanish, The Skin I Live In, one in Danish, The Hunt, and one in Korean, Snowpiercer, made mostly in English by a Korean director and listed by TMDB as Korean.

Films of 2010

The first year of the guide is the best rated of the four, and it opens with the most voted film of the whole guide. Its action shelf is a year of dreams and sagas, its comedy shelf a year of great animation, and its drama shelf holds five of the ten films that competed for the Academy Award for best picture: The King's Speech, which won it, The Social Network, Black Swan, The Fighter and True Grit. Three more of the ten, Inception, 127 Hours and Toy Story 3, sit on the other two shelves.

Action 2010

The shelf Action 2010 gathers thirteen action and adventure films with about 170,500 votes and an average rating of 6.9. The most voted and the best rated is Inception, by Christopher Nolan, with Rate: 84%: Leonardo DiCaprio plays Cobb, a thief who steals secrets from inside the dreams of his targets and is offered a last job, to plant an idea instead, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Tom Hardy and Marion Cotillard; at 148 minutes it is the longest film of the shelf, and it won four Academy Awards, for its cinematography, its sound and its visual effects. Iron Man 2, by Jon Favreau, sends Robert Downey Jr. back into the armour, and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, by David Yates, Rate: 77%, follows Harry, Ron and Hermione out of Hogwarts on the hunt for the Horcruxes.

The comic books are everywhere: Kick-Ass, by Matthew Vaughn, a schoolboy who becomes a masked hero with only his courage, beside the fierce young Hit-Girl, played by Chloë Grace Moretz; Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, by Edgar Wright, a young bassist of Toronto who must defeat the seven evil exes of his girlfriend in the style of a video game, and RED, a retired CIA agent played by Bruce Willis who gathers his old team. Sylvester Stallone directed and led The Expendables, a band of ageing mercenaries with Jason Statham and Jet Li, and Denzel Washington crosses a ruined America in The Book of Eli.

The rest of the shelf mixes fantasy and true adventure. TRON: Legacy, by Joseph Kosinski, pulls the son of a game designer into a digital world, with Jeff Bridges; Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief makes a teenager the son of Poseidon; Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, with Jake Gyllenhaal, comes from a video game, and The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, with Rate: 62%, the lowest of the shelf, continues the vampire romance of Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson. 127 Hours, by Danny Boyle, the shortest film of the shelf, tells the true story of Aron Ralston, a climber trapped by a boulder in a canyon of Utah, played by James Franco. The guide Action 2010 sums it up.

Comedy 2010

The shelf Comedy 2010 gathers thirteen comedies and animated films with about 122,500 votes and an average rating of 7.03. Five of its films are animated, and they lead the shelf. The most voted is Despicable Me, by Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud, about 16,500 votes, the supervillain Gru, voiced by Steve Carell, who plans to steal the Moon with the help of his yellow Minions and three orphan girls; just behind comes Toy Story 3, by Lee Unkrich, Rate: 78%, the toys of Andy facing his departure for college, which won the Academy Award for best animated feature. How to Train Your Dragon, by Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois, Rate: 79%, makes the shy Viking boy Hiccup the friend of a wounded dragon; Tangled, Disney's Rapunzel, gives the princess with the endless hair a thief for a guide, and Megamind makes a blue alien villain, voiced by Will Ferrell, the defender of the city he wanted to rule. Shrek Forever After closes the saga of the ogre.

The best rated film of the shelf has far fewer votes: Flipped, by Rob Reiner, Rate: 80% on about 3,500 votes, the first love of two teenagers of the late 1950s, told in turn by the girl and the boy. Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, with Mia Wasikowska and Johnny Depp, at 108 minutes the longest of the shelf, sends a grown Alice back down the rabbit hole. Easy A, by Will Gluck, made Emma Stone a star as a schoolgirl who invents a scandalous reputation; Grown Ups, by Dennis Dugan, gathers Adam Sandler and his friends for the funeral of their old coach; Due Date, by Todd Phillips, sets Robert Downey Jr. and Zach Galifianakis on a road trip across America, and Tucker and Dale vs. Evil turns the horror film upside down, with two gentle hillbillies taken for killers by a group of students. Little Fockers, Rate: 57%, is the lowest of the shelf. The guide Comedy 2010 sums it up.

Drama 2010

The shelf Drama 2010 gathers thirteen dramas and thrillers with about 107,200 votes and an average rating of 7.39, the best of the twelve shelves. The most voted and the best rated is Shutter Island, by Martin Scorsese, Rate: 82%, at 138 minutes the longest of the shelf: Leonardo DiCaprio plays Teddy Daniels, a federal marshal sent to an island hospital for the criminally insane in 1954 to find a missing patient, with Mark Ruffalo and Ben Kingsley. Black Swan, by Darren Aronofsky, follows a ballerina, played by Natalie Portman, who loses her grip on reality as she prepares for the double role of Swan Lake, a part that won Portman the Academy Award for best actress. The Social Network, by David Fincher, tells the founding of Facebook at Harvard, with Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg and a script by Aaron Sorkin.

The King's Speech, by Tom Hooper, Rate: 77%, the winner of the Academy Award for best picture, follows the future King George VI, played by Colin Firth, and the Australian speech therapist who helps him master his stammer, played by Geoffrey Rush. The Fighter, by David O. Russell, tells the rise of the boxer Micky Ward, played by Mark Wahlberg, with Christian Bale as his brother; True Grit, by the Coen brothers, a girl of fourteen who hires a drunken marshal, played by Jeff Bridges, to hunt her father's killer, and The Town, directed by and starring Ben Affleck, a gang of bank robbers of Boston. The Canadian Incendies, by Denis Villeneuve, Rate: 81%, in French, sends two twins to the Middle East on the trail of their mother's past.

The love stories of the shelf are many. Love & Other Drugs sets Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway in the pharmaceutical trade of the 1990s; Blue Valentine, by Derek Cianfrance, follows the birth and the end of a marriage with Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams; Dear John, by Lasse Hallström, and The Last Song, the shortest film of the shelf, come from novels by Nicholas Sparks, the second with Miley Cyrus and Liam Hemsworth, and Remember Me gives Robert Pattinson a role far from Twilight, as a young man of New York in the summer of 2001. The guide Drama 2010 sums it up.

Films of 2011

The second year of the guide is the year when Marvel prepared The Avengers, with the first films of Captain America and Thor, and the year when Harry Potter came to an end. Its comedy shelf is the weakest of the guide by rating, but its drama shelf holds the most voted French film of the guide and some of the most original thrillers of the decade.

Action 2011

The shelf Action 2011 gathers thirteen action and adventure films with about 183,900 votes and an average rating of 7.01. Its first two films introduce two members of the Avengers: Captain America: The First Avenger, by Joe Johnston, the most voted of the shelf with about 23,400 votes, in which Chris Evans plays Steve Rogers, a frail young man of Brooklyn turned into a super-soldier during the Second World War, and Thor, by Kenneth Branagh, the proud god of thunder, played by Chris Hemsworth, banished to Earth by his father. The best rated is Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, by David Yates, Rate: 81%, the last battle of Hogwarts and the end of the saga that began in 2001.

The prequels and sequels fill the shelf. X-Men: First Class, by Matthew Vaughn, goes back to 1962 and the Cuban missile crisis to show the friendship of the young Charles Xavier and Erik Lensherr, played by James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender; Rise of the Planet of the Apes, at 105 minutes the shortest film of the shelf, follows the chimpanzee Caesar, played by Andy Serkis in motion capture, from a laboratory of San Francisco to the revolt of the apes, and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides sends Johnny Depp after the Fountain of Youth. Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, the first live-action film of Brad Bird, hangs Tom Cruise on the outside of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai; Fast Five, by Justin Lin, moves the street racers to Rio de Janeiro for a great robbery, with Dwayne Johnson as the agent on their trail, and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, by Guy Ritchie, sets Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law against Professor Moriarty.

In Time, by Andrew Niccol, imagines a world where time has replaced money and the rich can live for ever, with Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried; Real Steel, by Shawn Levy, a former boxer, played by Hugh Jackman, who trains a fighting robot with his young son. Transformers: Dark of the Moon, by Michael Bay, at 154 minutes the longest film of the shelf, brings the war of the robots to Chicago, and The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1, with Rate: 62%, the lowest of the shelf, marries Bella and Edward. The guide Action 2011 sums it up.

Comedy 2011

The shelf Comedy 2011 gathers thirteen comedies and animated films with about 98,800 votes and an average rating of 6.71, the lowest of the twelve shelves. The most voted is The Hangover Part II, by Todd Phillips, about 11,600 votes, in which Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms and Zach Galifianakis lose another night, this time in Bangkok before a wedding. The best rated is Midnight in Paris, by Woody Allen, Rate: 75%: Owen Wilson plays a Hollywood screenwriter on holiday in Paris who, every night at midnight, finds himself in the Paris of the 1920s among Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Picasso; the film won the Academy Award for best original screenplay.

Four animated films sit on the shelf. Rango, by Gore Verbinski, a chameleon who becomes sheriff of a desert town, voiced by Johnny Depp, won the Academy Award for best animated feature; Kung Fu Panda 2, at 91 minutes the shortest film of the shelf, sends Po against a peacock who threatens kung fu itself; Cars 2, by John Lasseter, turns Lightning McQueen and Mater into the heroes of a spy story, and Rio, by Carlos Saldanha, takes Blu, a pet macaw who has yet to learn to fly, back to Brazil. The Adventures of Tintin, by Steven Spielberg, made with motion capture after the books of Hergé, follows the young reporter, his dog Snowy and Captain Haddock on the trail of a sunken ship.

The live comedies follow the stars of the day. Crazy, Stupid, Love., with Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, follows a husband dumped by his wife who learns to seduce from a young charmer; Friends with Benefits, by Will Gluck, sets Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis in a romance that tries to stay casual; Horrible Bosses gathers three friends who plan to get rid of their bosses, and Just Go with It, by Dennis Dugan, makes Adam Sandler a surgeon who asks his assistant, played by Jennifer Aniston, to pose as his wife. Bridesmaids, by Paul Feig, written by and starring Kristen Wiig, at 125 minutes the longest of the shelf, follows the chaos before the wedding of a best friend, and Bad Teacher, with Cameron Diaz, Rate: 56%, is the lowest rated film of the whole guide. The guide Comedy 2011 sums it up.

Drama 2011

The shelf Drama 2011 gathers thirteen dramas and thrillers with about 113,400 votes and an average rating of 7.31. The most voted and the best rated is The Intouchables, by Éric Toledano and Olivier Nakache, about 19,000 votes and Rate: 83%, the second best rating of the whole guide: the true story of a rich Parisian left paralysed by an accident, played by François Cluzet, and the young man of the suburbs, played by Omar Sy, who becomes his carer and his friend. It is the most voted film in another language than English of the guide. The Help, by Tate Taylor, Rate: 82%, at 146 minutes the second longest of the shelf, tells the lives of the black maids of Jackson, Mississippi, in the early 1960s through a young white writer, played by Emma Stone, with Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer, who won the Academy Award for best supporting actress.

The thrillers of the shelf are many. Drive, by Nicolas Winding Refn, makes Ryan Gosling a silent stuntman of Los Angeles who drives getaway cars by night; Limitless, by Neil Burger, a struggling writer, played by Bradley Cooper, who takes a pill that lets him use his whole brain; Source Code, by Duncan Jones, at 93 minutes the shortest film of the shelf, a soldier who relives the last eight minutes of a man on a train to find a bomber, and Contagion, by Steven Soderbergh, a virus that spreads around the world in a few weeks, with Matt Damon and Marion Cotillard. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by David Fincher, at 158 minutes the longest film of the shelf, sets the journalist Mikael Blomkvist, played by Daniel Craig, and the hacker Lisbeth Salander, played by Rooney Mara, on the trail of a girl who vanished forty years earlier, and The Skin I Live In, by Pedro Almodóvar, in Spanish, makes Antonio Banderas a surgeon who creates an artificial skin.

The horror films are three: Insidious, by James Wan, a family whose son falls into a long sleep haunted by spirits; Scream 4, the last film of Wes Craven, which brings Sidney Prescott home to Woodsboro fifteen years after the first murders, and Super 8, by J.J. Abrams, a group of children of Ohio in 1979 who film a train crash and the creature that escapes from it. Moneyball, by Bennett Miller, tells how Billy Beane, the manager of the Oakland Athletics, played by Brad Pitt, built a baseball team with statistics, and One Day, by Lone Scherfig, follows Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess on the same day of every year for two decades. The guide Drama 2011 sums it up.

Films of 2012

The third year of the guide is its most voted, with about 457,700 votes. It is the year when the Avengers first fought together on screen, when Christopher Nolan closed his Batman trilogy and Peter Jackson went back to Middle-earth, and its drama shelf holds both Argo, the winner of the Academy Award for best picture, and Django Unchained, the third most voted film of the whole guide.

Action 2012

The shelf Action 2012 gathers thirteen action and adventure films with about 224,900 votes, the most of the twelve shelves, and an average rating of 7.02. The most voted and the best rated is The Avengers, by Joss Whedon, about 40,100 votes and Rate: 81%: Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, the Hulk, Black Widow and Hawkeye join forces against Loki and an alien army over New York. The Dark Knight Rises, by Christopher Nolan, Rate: 78%, ends his trilogy with Christian Bale against the masked Bane, played by Tom Hardy, and The Amazing Spider-Man, by Marc Webb, starts the story of Peter Parker again with Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone.

Two great sagas began this year. The Hunger Games, by Gary Ross, makes Jennifer Lawrence Katniss Everdeen, the girl who volunteers in her sister's place for a televised fight to the death, and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, by Peter Jackson, at 169 minutes the longest film of the shelf, sends Bilbo Baggins, played by Martin Freeman, on the road with Gandalf and thirteen dwarves; with its sequel of 2013, it is one of the two films of the guide whose first country of production is New Zealand. Skyfall, by Sam Mendes, brings James Bond, played by Daniel Craig, home to defend M and MI6 against a former agent, played by Javier Bardem, and Life of Pi, by Ang Lee, the long voyage of a boy and a Bengal tiger in a lifeboat, won Lee the Academy Award for best director.

Science fiction fills the rest of the shelf. Prometheus, by Ridley Scott, sends a crew to a distant moon in search of the makers of mankind; Looper, by Rian Johnson, makes Joseph Gordon-Levitt a hired killer of 2044 who must kill his older self, played by Bruce Willis, and Men in Black 3, at 106 minutes the shortest film of the shelf, sends Will Smith back to 1969 to save the young Agent K, played by Josh Brolin. 21 Jump Street, by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, makes Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum two young policemen undercover in a high school; The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2 ends the vampire saga, and Snow White and the Huntsman, with Kristen Stewart, Chris Hemsworth and Charlize Theron, with Rate: 60%, is the lowest of the shelf. The guide Action 2012 sums it up.

Comedy 2012

The shelf Comedy 2012 gathers thirteen comedies and animated films with about 113,600 votes and an average rating of 6.83, and seven of its films are animated, the most of any shelf. The most voted is Brave, by Mark Andrews and Brenda Chapman, about 14,500 votes, the Scottish princess Merida who would rather shoot arrows than marry, and whose wish turns her mother into a bear; it won the Academy Award for best animated feature. Wreck-It Ralph, by Rich Moore, Rate: 74%, follows the villain of an old arcade game who wants to be a hero; Rise of the Guardians, also at Rate: 74%, sets Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy against the bogeyman; Hotel Transylvania, by Genndy Tartakovsky, makes Dracula, voiced by Adam Sandler, the anxious father of a teenage daughter, and Ice Age: Continental Drift and Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted continue two sagas of animal friends.

The best rated film of the shelf is Moonrise Kingdom, by Wes Anderson, Rate: 77%, two twelve-year-olds who run away together on an island of New England in the summer of 1965, with Bruce Willis, Edward Norton and Bill Murray among the adults who search for them. Ted, by Seth MacFarlane, gives Mark Wahlberg a teddy bear who came to life and grew into a foul-mouthed adult; Pitch Perfect follows Anna Kendrick into a college a cappella group; Project X, a high school party that gets out of hand, and American Reunion brings back the friends of American Pie for their high school reunion. The Dictator, with Sacha Baron Cohen as the ruler of an imaginary country who loses his beard in New York, is at 83 minutes the shortest film of the whole guide, and Tim Burton's Dark Shadows, with Johnny Depp as a vampire freed in 1972, is the lowest rated of the shelf, Rate: 61%. The guide Comedy 2012 sums it up.

Drama 2012

The shelf Drama 2012 gathers thirteen dramas and thrillers with about 119,300 votes and an average rating of 7.29. The most voted and the best rated is Django Unchained, by Quentin Tarantino, about 28,800 votes and Rate: 82%: a freed slave, played by Jamie Foxx, and a German bounty hunter, played by Christoph Waltz, ride to a plantation of Mississippi to free his wife from its owner, played by Leonardo DiCaprio; Waltz won the Academy Award for best supporting actor and Tarantino the award for best original screenplay. Argo, directed by and starring Ben Affleck, the winner of the Academy Award for best picture, tells how the CIA brought six Americans out of revolutionary Iran in 1980 by pretending they were a film crew.

Silver Linings Playbook, by David O. Russell, sets Bradley Cooper as a former teacher back from a psychiatric hospital and Jennifer Lawrence as a young widow who wins him over through a dance contest; the role won Lawrence the Academy Award for best actress. The Perks of Being a Wallflower, directed by Stephen Chbosky after his own novel, Rate: 78%, follows a shy freshman of Pittsburgh in 1991 with Emma Watson and Ezra Miller; The Hunt, by Thomas Vinterberg, in Danish, Rate: 81%, makes Mads Mikkelsen a kindergarten teacher falsely accused by a child, and The Impossible, by J. A. Bayona, follows a family caught in the tsunami of 2004 in Thailand. Denzel Washington plays an airline pilot who saves his passengers while drunk in Flight, and Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty, with Jessica Chastain, follows the long hunt for Osama bin Laden.

The longest film of the shelf is Cloud Atlas, by the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer, 172 minutes, six stories from the nineteenth century to a distant future, with Tom Hanks and Halle Berry in several roles each, and close behind comes Les Misérables, by Tom Hooper, the musical of Victor Hugo's novel with Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway, who won the Academy Award for best supporting actress. Sinister, with Ethan Hawke, a writer of true crime who finds old films of murders in his new house, and The Cabin in the Woods, by Drew Goddard, the shortest and the lowest rated of the shelf, Rate: 67%, a horror film that turns the rules of the genre inside out, are the two horror films of the shelf, and The Vow sets Rachel McAdams as a young wife who loses her memory after an accident and Channing Tatum as the husband she must fall in love with again. The guide Drama 2012 sums it up.

Films of 2013

The last year of the guide is the year of the old site's last Year link, 13, and its films were the newest on zmovie.tv when the capture was made. It holds the most voted animated film of the guide, Frozen, and a drama shelf as strong as that of 2010, with The Wolf of Wall Street, Prisoners and 12 Years a Slave, the winner of the Academy Award for best picture.

Action 2013

The shelf Action 2013 gathers thirteen action and adventure films with about 195,900 votes and an average rating of 6.94. The most voted is Iron Man 3, by Shane Black, about 24,000 votes, Tony Stark against a terrorist called the Mandarin after the battle of New York, and the sequels follow: The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Rate: 74%, sends Katniss and Peeta back into the arena; Thor: The Dark World sets Thor against the dark elves, and The Wolverine, by James Mangold, takes Hugh Jackman to Japan, with Rate: 64%, the lowest of the shelf. The best rated is The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, by Peter Jackson, Rate: 76%, at 161 minutes the longest of the shelf, in which Bilbo and the dwarves reach the Lonely Mountain and the dragon who guards it.

Gravity, by Alfonso Cuarón, at 91 minutes the shortest film of the shelf, leaves Sandra Bullock and George Clooney adrift above the Earth after debris destroys their shuttle; it won seven Academy Awards, among them best director. World War Z, by Marc Forster, sends Brad Pitt around the world in a zombie pandemic; Man of Steel, by Zack Snyder, tells the story of Superman again with Henry Cavill; Pacific Rim, by Guillermo del Toro, sets giant robots against monsters from the sea, and Oblivion, by Joseph Kosinski, makes Tom Cruise a repairman of drones on an Earth left empty after a war. Snowpiercer, by Bong Joon Ho, sets the last survivors of a frozen world aboard a train that circles the globe, with Chris Evans and Song Kang-ho; Star Trek Into Darkness, by J.J. Abrams, sends the crew of the Enterprise after a terrorist from inside Starfleet, and Fast & Furious 6 gathers the street racers once more against a gang of mercenaries in London. The guide Action 2013 sums it up.

Comedy 2013

The shelf Comedy 2013 gathers thirteen comedies and animated films with about 111,300 votes and an average rating of 6.72. The most voted is Frozen, by Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee, about 18,000 votes, the most voted animated film of the guide: the princess Anna sets out across a frozen kingdom to find her sister Elsa, whose powers of ice have locked Arendelle in an endless winter. It won the Academy Awards for best animated feature and best song. Five more animated films follow: Despicable Me 2, in which Gru joins the Anti-Villain League; Monsters University, the student years of Mike and Sulley; The Croods, a family of the Stone Age forced out of its cave; Turbo, a garden snail who dreams of the Indy 500, and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2, a young inventor on an island of living food.

The best rated film of the shelf is Her, by Spike Jonze, Rate: 78%: Joaquin Phoenix plays a lonely writer of Los Angeles who falls in love with the voice of his computer's operating system, played by Scarlett Johansson; Jonze won the Academy Award for best original screenplay. The longest film of the shelf is the French Blue Is the Warmest Color, by Abdellatif Kechiche, 180 minutes, the love of a schoolgirl, played by Adèle Exarchopoulos, and a young painter with blue hair, played by Léa Seydoux, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes for the director and both actresses. We're the Millers sets Jennifer Aniston and Jason Sudeikis in a fake family on a smuggling trip to Mexico; The Hangover Part III ends the saga of the wolfpack; Grown Ups 2 and The Internship, in which Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson become interns at Google, are the other live comedies, and Don Jon, written, directed by and starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, a young man of New Jersey whose ideas of love come from the screen, is at 90 minutes the shortest and, with Rate: 60%, the lowest of the shelf. The guide Comedy 2013 sums it up.

Drama 2013

The shelf Drama 2013 gathers thirteen dramas and thrillers with about 145,500 votes, the most of the four drama shelves, and an average rating of 7.32. The most voted is The Wolf of Wall Street, by Martin Scorsese, about 26,800 votes and Rate: 80%, at 180 minutes the longest film of the shelf: Leonardo DiCaprio plays Jordan Belfort, a stockbroker of Long Island who grows rich on fraud in the 1990s, with Jonah Hill and Margot Robbie. The best rated is Prisoners, by Denis Villeneuve, Rate: 81%, the second film of Villeneuve in the guide after Incendies: a father, played by Hugh Jackman, takes the law into his own hands when his daughter is kidnapped, while a detective, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, searches for her.

12 Years a Slave, by Steve McQueen, Rate: 79%, tells the true story of Solomon Northup, a free black man of New York kidnapped and sold into slavery in 1841, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, with Lupita Nyong'o, who won the Academy Award for best supporting actress. Dallas Buyers Club, Rate: 79%, won the awards for best actor and best supporting actor for Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto, as a Texan electrician who smuggles medicines for patients with AIDS in the 1980s and his business partner; American Hustle, by David O. Russell, sets Christian Bale and Amy Adams as two con artists forced to work for the FBI, and About Time, by Richard Curtis, also at Rate: 79%, gives a young Englishman the power to travel back in his own life, with Rachel McAdams and Bill Nighy.

Leonardo DiCaprio appears a second time on the shelf as The Great Gatsby, by Baz Luhrmann, with Tobey Maguire and Carey Mulligan, in the New York of 1922. Now You See Me, by Louis Leterrier, the second most voted of the shelf, follows four magicians who rob banks during their shows; The Place Beyond the Pines, by Derek Cianfrance, links the lives of a stunt rider, played by Ryan Gosling, and a policeman, played by Bradley Cooper, across two generations. The horror films are four: The Conjuring, by James Wan, the paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren in a haunted farmhouse; Evil Dead, by Fede Álvarez, the shortest of the shelf; Warm Bodies, a young zombie who falls in love with a living girl, and Carrie, the remake of the film of 1976 after Stephen King, with Chloë Grace Moretz, Rate: 61%, the lowest of the shelf. The guide Drama 2013 sums it up.

The directors of the four years

In a guide of four years, few directors return more than twice. Three have three films each: Dennis Dugan, with the two Grown Ups films and Just Go with It, all with Adam Sandler; Todd Phillips, with Due Date and the last two Hangover films, and David O. Russell, with The Fighter, Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle, three films in four years that all competed for the Academy Award for best picture. Many have two: Christopher Nolan with Inception and The Dark Knight Rises, Martin Scorsese with Shutter Island and The Wolf of Wall Street, David Fincher with The Social Network and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Denis Villeneuve with Incendies and Prisoners, Peter Jackson with the first two Hobbit films, and Matthew Vaughn with Kick-Ass and X-Men: First Class, among others. The guide The directors lists them.

The stars of the four years

The stars of the early 2010s are easy to follow from shelf to shelf. Anne Hathaway and Bradley Cooper appear among the first names of six films each: Hathaway from Alice in Wonderland and Love & Other Drugs to The Dark Knight Rises and Les Misérables, Cooper from the Hangover films to Limitless, Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle. Leonardo DiCaprio leads five films, Inception, Shutter Island, Django Unchained, The Great Gatsby and The Wolf of Wall Street, four of them the most voted films of their shelves; Robert Downey Jr. has five as well, three of them as Tony Stark, and Jennifer Lawrence five, from X-Men: First Class to the two Hunger Games films and two films of David O. Russell. Emma Stone, Chris Hemsworth, Hugh Jackman, Jonah Hill and Rose Byrne complete the list with five films each.

ZMovie in figures

The 156 films of the guide carry about 1,706,700 votes on TMDB, with an average rating of 7.04, and twelve of them reach a rating of 8 or more. Together they last about 18,250 minutes, more than 304 hours; the longest are The Wolf of Wall Street and Blue Is the Warmest Color, with 180 minutes each, and the shortest is The Dictator, with 83. The United States is the first country of production of 122 films, Britain of sixteen; 150 films are in English and six in other languages. The drama shelves have the best ratings, from 7.29 to 7.39 on average, and the comedy shelves the lowest, from 6.71 to 7.03, while the action shelves hold the most votes, more than 775,000 of them. The guide The figures gathers every number.

The look of ZMovie

The look of this guide comes from zmovie.tv as archived by the Wayback Machine in 2012 and 2013, with its style sheet and its theme images. The page sits on a dark red pattern, #670505 with #2C0202, under a white panel; the links of the bar are light blue tabs, #C2DAE4, with the active tab in dark grey, as the Watch Movies tab of the old site; the search bar is light green, #DBEDBF, and the introduction sits on the periwinkle of the old carousel, #C5C9F8. Film titles are red, #970000, bold, underlined and wrapped in quotation marks, as on the old cards, and the twelve shelves form a Movie Years box in three columns, with one row for each year. The logo keeps the film-frame icon and the red outlined italic letters of the old WATCH-MOVIES logo. The guide The look of ZMovie explains each colour.

Where to begin

For a first evening, take one film from each year. From 2010, Inception, the most voted and best rated film of the guide, or Toy Story 3 for the family; from 2011, The Intouchables, Drive or Midnight in Paris; from 2012, The Avengers, Django Unchained or Moonrise Kingdom, and from 2013, Gravity, Her or Prisoners. For a whole season of awards, follow the three winners of the Academy Award for best picture of the guide, The King's Speech, Argo and 12 Years a Slave.

How to use ZMovie

The home page opens with the periwinkle banner and the Movie Years box, where each of the twelve shelves has its name and its number of films, in three columns with one row per year; each name leads to its row. Each row carries the name of the shelf in red under a grey bar, twelve posters and a link that opens the full shelf. The tabs of the bar lead to the four years, and the green search bar finds any film by its title; the guide Search tips explains how.

Each poster shows the year at the top and the Rate line on a green band at the bottom, for example Rate: 84% for Inception, with the title in red quotation marks below. The film page has the English synopsis, the cast, the director and the genres. The Watch now button opens the film on JustWatch, which shows the services that offer it in your country, and the button Add to My List keeps it in My list, stored in your browser. The guide How to use ZMovie explains each part, and the guide The Watch now button explains how JustWatch works.

Questions