RANKED: The 23 most awe-inspiring uses of CGI in movies

Since the late 1970s, computer-generated imagery, or CGI, has become one of Hollywood's most indispensable tools - particularly in the kind of enormous, spectacle-driven franchise film on which the industry increasingly relies.

Today, CGI can be found in almost everything you see on the big screen. A great example is "The Jungle Book," out this weekend, a live-action retelling of the classic 1967 Disney animated feature. It features eye-popping, realistic CGI animals that "man-cub" Mowgli encounters deep in the jungle.

But before "Jungle Book," there were movies that changed the way the whole medium was understood and wielded with CGI, and expanded the kinds of stories Hollywood can tell.

Here we rank the 23 best movies ever to use CGI (limited to live-action, rather than animated, movies).