1.21 Gigawatts

The 25th anniversary of Back to the Future came and went in 2010 with the usual commemorative noise—Blu-ray sets, cast reunions, McFly on talk show sofas—and none of it made the film feel dated, which is remarkable. Michael J. Fox carries the whole thing on a kind of frantic charm that shouldn’t hold up as well as it does: a teenager desperate to fit in, bumbling backward through his own family history, accidentally making his mother fall in love with him. Dark premise dressed as a caper. The DeLorean is just a prop. The real engine is the terror of being out of place in time, which, at fifteen, you feel in your bones without needing a flux capacitor to prove it. I’ve never stopped loving this film.