Home Alone (1990)

The decade's family comedy benchmark, and the one most households still put on every December. Macaulay Culkin's Kevin is a kid with a plan, and the last act turns the house into a slapstick obstacle course where Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern take punishment like silent-movie clowns. It works for a mixed-age room because the jokes run on two tracks: kids get the traps, adults get Catherine O'Hara's frantic trip home and the gentle sadness of a boy discovering he misses his family.