Scream

Ladies and gentlemen: the 90s. Scream has actually aged remarkably well, given that it should define a decade of film making. Only that mobiles are treated as a novelty - "What are you doing with a cellular telephone, son?" - seems odd now. Even the fashions don't look out of place as 1996 is now long enough ago for it to be coming back as retro and oh god oh god I'm old. Scream also stands as a testament that any (well, most) actors can give a great performance given the right script and director. The cast is mostly composed of actors whose performances elsewhere are less than stellar but who are fantastic here - Neve Campbell and Courtney Cox are almost never better, except that they're both better in Scream 2. For all the talk of Scream being a comedy horror - Total Film said they couldn't imagine a straight horror movie being made after Scream - it's actually far less goofy than... well, pretty much every slasher movie that precedes it; the difference being, the few jokes in Scream are funny. After repeated viewings, it's lost its power to scare me now, but it still makes me laugh. Dewey Riley is one of the only genuinely funny comic relief characters, and his relationship with Gale plays like a genuine romantic comedy in the middle of all of the carnage. "I'm 25; I was 24 for a whole year." remains one of my favourite lines from... well, any movie, really.