Ron Howard is going to be flying the Millennium Falcon through a galaxy far, far away very soon, but the first time he took a trip into outer space he returned with the best entry in his long filmography: this 1995 dramatization of NASA’s workmanlike efforts to rescue three astronauts stranded in orbit, using literally nothing more than some tubing, some duct tape, and math. The cast is amazing (Ed Harris, Bill Paxton, Kevin Bacon, Tom Hanks), James Horner’s score is an all-timer, and the ending is appropriately triumphant, although time has made it bittersweet since, yunno, our country has basically abandoned space exploration and science in general. We weren’t always this disgustingly ignorant and willfully stupid, and Apollo 13 is one of the better reminders of what we used to be. by Bobby Roberts