The best films for a group don't flatten the experience - they create one. You want something that generates opinions, debates, a reason to stay up later than planned.
The 80s and 90s remain a goldmine. Films that were commercially dismissed on release and now considered essential.
Science fiction cinema at its finest takes ideas seriously. Not as window dressing â as the engine. These films are built around questions worth asking.
The epic saga continues as Luke Skywalker, in hopes of defeating the evil Galactic Empire, learns the ways of the Jedi from aging master Yoda. But Darth Vader is more determined than ever to capture Luke. Meanwhile, rebel leader Princess Leia, cocky Han Solo, Chewbacca, and droids C-3PO and R2-D2 are thrown into various stages of capture, betrayal and despair.
Eighties teenager Marty McFly is accidentally sent back in time to 1955, inadvertently disrupting his parents' first meeting and attracting his mother's romantic interest. Marty must repair the damage to history by rekindling his parents' romance and - with the help of his eccentric inventor friend Doc Brown - return to 1985.
SEELE orders an all-out attack on NERV, aiming to destroy the Evas before Gendo can advance his own plans for the Human Instrumentality Project. Shinji is pushed to the limits of his sanity as he is forced to decide the fate of humanity.
Set in the 22nd century, The Matrix tells the story of a computer hacker who joins a group of underground insurgents fighting the vast and powerful computers who now rule the earth.
Ten years after the events of the original, a reprogrammed T-800 is sent back in time to protect young John Connor from the shape-shifting T-1000. Together with his mother Sarah, he fights to stop Skynet from triggering a nuclear apocalypse.
These films use the grammar of science fiction â the technology, the strangeness, the distance â to say things that couldn't be said any other way.
A research team in Antarctica is hunted by a shape-shifting alien that assumes the appearance of its victims.
A wealthy entrepreneur secretly creates a theme park featuring living dinosaurs drawn from prehistoric DNA. Before opening day, he invites a team of experts and his two eager grandchildren to experience the park and help calm anxious investors. However, the park is anything but amusing as the security systems go off-line and the dinosaurs escape.
Ripley, the sole survivor of the Nostromo's deadly encounter with the monstrous Alien, returns to Earth after drifting through space in hypersleep for 57 years. Although her story is initially met with skepticism, she agrees to accompany a team of Colonial Marines back to LV-426.
In the small town of Rockwell, Maine in October 1957, a giant metal machine befriends a nine-year-old boy and ultimately finds its humanity by unselfishly saving people from their own fears and prejudices.
A secret military project endangers Neo-Tokyo when it turns a biker gang member into a rampaging psychic psychopath that only two teenagers and a group of psychics can stop.
The twist endings that hold up aren't tricks - they're revelations. Everything was there. You just didn't see it yet.
These films earn their place in the canon not through spectacle but through the seriousness with which they treat their ideas. The wonder is a bonus.