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.
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.
The best thrillers work because the tension is internal as much as external. The characters are fighting themselves as much as any external threat.
A kidnapped boy strikes up a friendship with his captor: an escaped convict on the run from the law, headed by an honorable U.S. Marshal.
After Dr. Bill Harford's wife, Alice, admits to having sexual fantasies about a man she met, Bill becomes obsessed with having a sexual encounter. He discovers an underground sexual group and attends one of their meetings -- and quickly discovers that he is in over his head.
Wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife and sentenced to death, Richard Kimble escapes from the law in an attempt to find the real killer and clear his name.
While working on a thesis about audiovisual violence, film student Ángela finds a snuff video where a girl is tortured until death. Soon she discovers that she was a former student in her university, and that the authors of the video are not very far either.
A renowned New York playwright is enticed to California to write for the movies and discovers the hellish truth of Hollywood.
These films earn their suspense slowly, deliberately, brick by brick. By the time the pressure peaks, you're completely invested and there's nowhere to go.
A research chemist comes under personal and professional attack when he decides to appear in a 60 Minutes exposé on Big Tobacco.
Set in 1929, a political boss and his advisor have a parting of the ways when they both fall for the same woman.
Handsome 25-year-old Cesar had it all -- a successful career, expensive cars, a swank bachelor's pad, and an endless string of beautiful and willing women -- until he is thrown into a strange psychological mystery after a car accident scars his face and lands him in prison.
The starship Enterprise and its crew is pulled back into action when old nemesis, Khan, steals a top secret device called Project Genesis.
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.
The films that change cinema are rarely the ones trying to. They're usually just trying to be great - and accidentally redrawing the map.
These films work because they take the mechanics of suspense seriously. Not as a trick. As a language for telling you something true about fear and choice.