Oscar Winner

award

Won at least one Academy Award.

Star Wars (1977) poster

Star Wars

1977

A farm boy on a desert planet intercepts a distress call hidden in a droid, and is swept into a galactic rebellion alongside a cynical smuggler, a fugitive princess and the last of an ancient order of knights — with a moon-sized battle station waiting at the end of the run.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) poster

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

1977

After a close encounter with a UFO, Indiana power-company lineman Roy Neary becomes obsessed with a mountain shape he can't explain — one of hundreds of ordinary people worldwide being quietly invited to a rendezvous the government is racing to keep secret.

Alien (1979) poster

Alien

1979

The commercial towing vessel Nostromo, hauling ore between stars, is diverted by company order to investigate a signal from a dead world. What the crew brings back aboard has a life cycle perfectly designed to use them — and their employer knew.

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) poster

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

1982

A gentle alien botanist is stranded in a California suburb when his ship leaves without him. Found by a lonely ten-year-old boy in the aftermath of his parents' divorce, the two form a bond so deep it becomes biological — while government agents close in and the visitor grows fatally homesick.

Back to the Future (1985) poster

Back to the Future

1985

Teenager Marty McFly is accidentally blasted from 1985 to 1955 in a time machine his friend Doc Brown built out of a DeLorean. Stranded with no plutonium, he derails his own parents' first meeting — and has one week to make his father fall in love with his mother, or he'll never be born.

Aliens (1986) poster

Aliens

1986

Ellen Ripley, sole survivor of the Nostromo, is found drifting after 57 years in hypersleep — and nobody believes her story. When contact is lost with a colony on the very world where her crew found the derelict ship, she returns with a unit of cocky Colonial Marines. This time it isn't one alien.

Total Recall (1990) poster

Total Recall

1990

Construction worker Doug Quaid can't stop dreaming of Mars, so he buys the memory of a trip from Rekall Inc. — and the implant chair wakes something already buried in his head. Soon he's killing trained agents by reflex, and the only certainty is a message from his own face: get your ass to Mars.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) poster

Terminator 2: Judgment Day

1991

Two terminators arrive in Los Angeles: a reprogrammed T-800 sent to protect ten-year-old John Connor, and the T-1000 — a liquid-metal prototype that can look like anyone — sent to kill him. With Sarah Connor institutionalized for telling the truth, the future's only hope is a boy, his mother, and the machine that once hunted her.

Jurassic Park (1993) poster

Jurassic Park

1993

Billionaire John Hammond has done the impossible: cloned dinosaurs from DNA preserved in amber, and built a theme park around them on a Costa Rican island. He invites two paleontologists, a chaos mathematician and his own grandchildren for a preview weekend — the same weekend a bribed employee shuts down the fences.

The Matrix (1999) poster

The Matrix

1999

By day, Thomas Anderson writes software; by night, as the hacker Neo, he chases a phrase that haunts the net: the Matrix. The answer — that reality is a simulation run by machines farming humanity for power, and that he may be the anomaly foretold to end it — arrives with sunglasses, a red pill, and the best action cinema of the decade.

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