Star Trek: First Contact (1996)

The strongest film with the Next Generation crew, and the one that works best cold. Captain Picard's Enterprise chases the Borg, a cyborg collective that absorbs whole species, back in time to 2063, where they mean to stop Zefram Cochrane (James Cromwell) from making the warp flight that leads to humanity's first contact with aliens. The film splits neatly in two: a tense, haunted-house fight through the decks of the ship, and a looser, funnier story on the ground with a hard-drinking, reluctant inventor. Alice Krige's Borg Queen is one of the franchise's great villains. Picard's grudge against the Borg comes from the show, but an opening dream sequence explains enough for it to land. Jonathan Frakes, who also plays Riker, directed.