The Wizard of Oz (1939)
The Wizard of Oz is a film so endearingly perfect in every way, it has, in the eighty-four years since its release, transcended cinema to become a cultural archetype, an icon for all that is fantastic, playful, terrifying, hopeful, beautifully dark and dream-like. It is a film, much like Star Wars, that everyone or nearly everyone has seen once, and to many, it will recall the more carefree and less-burdened age of their childhood, where the young and the young at heart could come together and dream of a world, "over the rainbow," wherein life made sense, tragedy did not lurk like a beast of prey, and the Kansas twister of TIME was not so brutal and devastating a force of nature.