The films that work best with parents are ones that hold up across different relationships with cinema. Neither too slow nor too demanding. Just genuinely good.
Go back far enough and you find films that had no idea they'd become classics. The 80s and 90s produced more of them than any other era.
A great mystery is built on trust. The film shows you every clue - and still manages to surprise you.
A widowed field mouse must move her family -- including an ailing son -- to escape a farmer's plow. Aided by a crow and a pack of superintelligent, escaped lab rats, the brave mother struggles to transplant her home to firmer ground.
Polish immigrant Karol Karol finds himself out of a marriage, a job and a country when his French wife, Dominique, divorces him after six months due to his impotence. Forced to leave France after losing the business they jointly owned, Karol enlists fellow Polish expatriate MikoĊaj to smuggle him back to their homeland.
A radio astronomer receives the first extraterrestrial radio signal ever picked up on Earth. As the world powers scramble to decipher the message and decide upon a course of action, she must make some difficult decisions between her beliefs, the truth, and reality.
Rex and Saskia, a young couple in love, are on vacation when they stop at a busy service station. Saskia is abducted in broad daylight and three years pass with no answers or closure surrounding her disappearance. Rex has nearly given up all hope when he suddenly begins receiving letters from her abductor.
A year after the murder of her mother, a teenage girl is terrorized by a masked killer who targets her and her friends by using scary movies as part of a deadly game.
The films here work because they respect the audience. Every clue is planted. Every reveal is earned. Nothing is arbitrary.
In the questionable town of Deer Meadow, Washington, FBI Agent Desmond inexplicably disappears while hunting for the man who murdered a teen girl. The killer is never apprehended, and, after experiencing dark visions and supernatural encounters, Agent Dale Cooper chillingly predicts that the culprit will claim another life. Meanwhile, in the more cozy town of Twin Peaks, hedonistic beauty Laura Palmer hangs with lowlifes and seems destined for a grisly fate.
After returning home from the Vietnam War, veteran Jacob Singer struggles to maintain his sanity. Plagued by hallucinations and flashbacks, Singer rapidly falls apart as the world and people around him morph and twist into disturbing images. His girlfriend, Jezzie, and ex-wife, Sarah, try to help, but to little avail. Even Singer's chiropractor friend, Louis, fails to reach him as he descends into madness.
While recording sound effects for a slasher flick, Jack Terry stumbles upon a real-life horror: a car careening off a bridge and into a river. Jack jumps into the water and fishes out Sally from the car, but the other passenger is already dead - a governor intending to run for president. As Jack does some investigating of his tapes, and starts a perilous romance with Sally, he enters a tangled web of conspiracy that might leave him dead.
A man struggles with memories of his past, including a wife he cannot remember, in a nightmarish world with no sun and run by beings with telekinetic powers who seek the souls of humans.
Times are tough at Premiere Properties. Shelley "the machine" Levene and Dave Moss are veteran salesmen, but only Ricky Roma is on a hot streak. The new Glengarry sales leads could turn everything around, but the front office is holding them back until these "losers" prove themselves. Then someone decides to take matters into his own hands, stealing the Glengarry leads and leaving everyone wondering who did it.
The films that fly under the radar often do so because they resist easy categorisation. That resistance is usually exactly what makes them worth finding.
Great mystery cinema changes how you watch everything else. You start looking for the clues in every story.