Aliens
Aliens is the best film James Cameron ever made. Not the biggest—lord knows the man himself has apparently conflated the two terms as his career exploded all over the box office in ever louder, ever-more-simple pandering blasts of spectacle—but the best. Imagine the audacity to follow up one of the most influential horror films ever made by turning it into a Vietnam War allegory that is also a metaphor for motherhood that is also an action film so perfectly paced that most people don't realize it takes over an hour before a single fanged penis-beast from outer space shows up. And imagine executing on that idea so well that movies, comics, and video games spend the next 30-plus years strip-mining every inch of it for inspiration. Cameron never wrote another script this tight, never directed actors this precisely, and never made a film this palpable—almost unbearable—again.
by Bobby Roberts