Back to the Future

1985

Robert Zemeckis sends a high school kid thirty years into the past and turns a time travel comedy into a near-perfect piece of clockwork. Michael J. Fox plays Marty McFly, stranded in 1955 after the DeLorean built by Christopher Lloyd's Doc Brown misfires, then forced to make sure his own parents fall in love before he erases himself out of existence. Crispin Glover and Lea Thompson play the teenage versions of those parents. Every setup pays off, which is rarer than it sounds.