Curated category
Films that won the Best Visual Effects Academy Award
- Aliens (film)Aliens, the 1986 science fiction-action film written and directed by James Cameron, opens with a woman who has been asleep for 57 years.
- Alien (film)Alien is a 1979 science fiction horror film that begins with a single, deceptively quiet transmission. A commercial starship called the Nostromo is hauling…
- First Man (film)First Man, the 2018 biographical drama directed by Damien Chazelle, opens not with the Moon but with a moment of quiet terror.
- The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the RingThe Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring opened on the 19th of December 2001, and within its first five days in the United States and Canada it had…
- Star Wars (film)Star Wars opened on the 25th of May 1977, in just 32 theaters across the United States. The cast and crew believed it would be a failure.
- 2001: A Space Odyssey2001: A Space Odyssey premiered on the 2nd of April 1968 at the Uptown Theater in Washington, D.C., before an audience that included critics who were, in…
- The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the KingThe Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King crossed the one-billion-dollar mark at the worldwide box office in February 2004, only the second film in…
- The Lord of the Rings: The Two TowersThe Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers premiered on the 5th of December 2002 at the Ziegfeld Theatre in New York City, and what audiences saw that night was…
- Ben-Hur (1959 film)Ben-Hur, the 1959 epic directed by William Wyler, arrived at a moment when Hollywood was fighting for its life. Television had eaten into ticket sales, and…
- Return of the JediReturn of the Jedi opened in American theaters on the 25th of May 1983. Lucas booked that date deliberately, exactly six years after the original Star Wars…
- Mary Poppins (film)Mary Poppins, the 1964 film directed by Robert Stevenson and produced by Walt Disney, had its premiere on the 27th of August 1964 at Grauman's Chinese…
- InceptionInception begins with a question that Christopher Nolan first put to paper around 2001: what if someone could steal your secrets while you slept?
- The Empire Strikes BackThe Empire Strikes Back opens with a single haunting image: probe droids scattered across the galaxy, hunting. It was the 21st of May 1980, and audiences…
- Titanic (1997 film)Titanic, the 1997 film written and directed by James Cameron, began not on a Hollywood lot but at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
- Ex Machina (film)Ex Machina is a 2014 science fiction film that opens with an office prize nobody expects: a solitary week at the isolated home of a tech CEO.