Jurassic Park, 1993

There are few movies more emblematic of ‘90s cinema’s heyday than Jurassic Park. Based on the novel by Michael Crichton, the film explores the possibilities of bringing dinosaurs back from the dead, and what happens when you try to harness the power of nature for financial gain—it’s a park, after all, meant for the amusement of attendees, not so much the preservation of long-extinct species. What happens when God creates dinosaurs, kills dinosaurs, then creates man—and man chooses to create dinosaurs? (“Dinosaurs eat man, woman inherits the earth,” of course.)

Jurassic Park melds practical effects with what was then state-of-the-art CG to impressive results that still hold up today. The velociraptor’s breath fogging up a glass window, the T-rex chewing on a car tire, the sickly stegosaurus being tended to by the lovely, captivating Laura Dern, are all visuals seared into the brains of anyone who’s seen Jurassic Park

Perfectly paced, well-acted, and shot with an eye that only Steven Spielberg has, Jurassic Park endures, always. — Alyssa Mercante