Star Trek: First Contact

Essential among the TNG films and the only one that works as a film. It is also watchable cold, with one caveat: the single best thing in it is Picard's reaction to the Borg, and that reaction is built on a two-part television episode from six years earlier in which he was captured and used by them. The film explains enough to follow and nowhere near enough to feel.

Jonathan Frakes directed and made a horror film. The Borg here are not the slow, procedural menace of the series; they are infestation, taking the ship deck by deck, converting the crew into themselves, shot in close quarters and low light. The sequence in the sickbay and the one on the hull are both staged as genuine suspense.

The reason it is more than that is Picard. Patrick Stewart plays him as a man whose composure is a performance over an unresolved trauma, and the film's turn is the scene where a civilian tells him plainly that he is behaving like Ahab and he breaks a display case. A blockbuster in which the hero's arc is admitting he wants revenge was not the obvious choice.

The parallel plot, in which the crew help a drunk inventor make humanity's first warp flight, provides the comedy and the sentiment and is the weaker half. Alice Krige's Borg Queen is a good addition and arguably the beginning of the franchise explaining a thing that worked better unexplained.