Back to the Future

His father George is a wimp, his mother Lorraine drinks, his audition to become the guitarist for the school prom has failed. In short, 17-year-old schoolboy Marty McFly is having a rough time. Then he receives an invitation from his eccentric friend Doc Brown, an inventor who has spent thirty years developing a time machine built into a DeLorean. When the car reaches the right speed, you can travel back in time. But the experiment is brutally disrupted, causing Marty to flee in the car. In doing so, he also reaches that speed and ends up 30 years in the past. There he meets George and Lorraine, then teenagers, just like Marty. This leads to some awkward situations.

Time travel is paradoxical by definition: you can change the past in such a way that you would never have been born. But how did you travel back in time? Director Robert Zemeckis masterfully circumvents this paradox in this hugely entertaining and highly successful film, which is now 40 years old. Starring Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd.