For Fans of Peter Jackson

Jackson was in his mid-twenties, shooting on weekends over four years with a borrowed 16mm camera and a crew of his own friends, and the result is genuinely imaginative and technically accomplished in ways that reveal a born filmmaker. Bad Taste is crude, funny, and completely self-assured. The alien costumes are homemade, the effects are practical and disgusting, and the comic timing is already precise. Anyone who only knows Jackson through the Rings films owes it to themselves to watch where he started.

Before the trilogy redefined what Jackson could build, he directed Heavenly Creatures, a dramatization of the real 1954 Parker-Hulme murder case in Christchurch. Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey are extraordinary, and the film handles obsessive friendship, class anxiety, and adolescent fantasy with a specificity that the epic films never needed to reach for. The sequences inside the girls' shared fantasy world are inventive and strange in ways that feel genuinely interior rather than decorative. It remains Jackson's most emotionally precise work.

Using Imperial War Museum footage that had been deteriorating for a century, Jackson's restoration team colorized, repaired, and converted WWI footage to 3D. The technical process is extraordinary but what stays with you is simpler: these are young men, recognizable as people rather than historical abstractions, and many of them are about to die. No narrator tells you how to feel. The film lets the footage speak with a directness that conventional documentary rhetoric would have undermined. It is the best use of restoration technology in film history.