10 Movies That Are Still Great After Twenty Viewings

3. Star Wars

It is the very sum of a generation's childhood: for a large bulk of the population, Star Wars is the nostalgic entity to end all nostalgic entities. It's not exactly clear why Star Wars remains so endlessly watchable, because how do you chart something as huge as Star Wars? All that is really clear is the fact that Star Wars is a movie that remains easy to watch, time and time again; and that probably hails from its relatively "simple" narrative - in a way, it offers an archetypical story in unfamiliar packaging.

But really, there is so much inherent to George Lucas' first Star Wars movie that singles it out as the most relentlessly rewatchable of the Original Trilogy - presumably the fact that it feels like a self-contained movie in its own right, and can essentially be viewed as such, makes it so. And then there's the world-building, of course, which shows (and hints) at so much in the short runtime of 121 minutes.

It is also the flick that contains the classic "nobody to hero" plotline that propels young Luke Skywalker from lowly teenager to Jedi warrior - who doesn't want to watch that playing out twenty times or more? Still, nostalgia aside (if that's at all possible), Star Wars is a tight, gripping and - best of all - brilliantly fun space opera of a movie. Perhaps, fundamentally, it's just that fun factor that has rendered it immortal.