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Now, just to say a little something about Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. (on that pairing I would have gone for Aliens, BTW. I love Caligari, but when it comes to horror, Aliens has it all going for it. One of the extraordinarily few good sequels. Anyway ...
1920s Germany produced some awesomely interesting avant garde work that was one of the things that got the collective Germanic Lederhosen in a bunch and allowed for the rise of the National Socialist Party. They thought that this weird artistic stuff was too subversive and permissive for the general populace. Anyway ... if you get the chance, see this movie. Rent it. I would expect it to be in the collections of a lot of libraries. Back in the day (mid 70s at a guess), the first time I saw it was by taking an 8mm print out of the library. Caligari presents a surreal landscape in which the absurd becomes normal, and the normal impossible. Cesare, the somnambulist is played by Conrad Veidt, whom you probably better recall as Major Strasser in Casablanca. Another bit of minor movie trivia involves Fritz Lang's M, another of my favorite films ... the head of the group of criminals (whose character name escapes me) wears a pair of gloves that are the negative of the gloves worn by Caligari. The sets are pieces of surrealist artwork in and of themselves, but enhance the overall experience of the film rather than distract from it.
So, basically, see this movie. It's only about an hour long, but does a lot more in that hour than most current films do in two.
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