The Parent Trap

The Parent Trap was Nancy Meyers' directorial debut, a remake of Disney's 1961 film — both drawn from Erich Kästner's 1949 German novel Das doppelte Lottchen — co-written with her longtime partner Charles Shyer. The premise is irresistible engine-of-plot stuff: twins Hallie Parker and Annie James, separated as infants when their parents split, collide at summer camp, figure out what their parents never told them, and swap places — California girl to London, London girl to Napa — to engineer a reunion between dad Dennis Quaid and mom Natasha Richardson.

The reason it worked sat squarely on an unknown eleven-year-old. Lindsay Lohan, in her feature debut, played both twins — an American and a convincingly British one — with motion-control photography stitching her two performances into the same frame so seamlessly that kids genuinely argued about whether there were two actresses. Released July 29, 1998, the film earned roughly $92 million worldwide on a $15 million budget, drew warm reviews, and won Lohan a Young Artist Award.

It has aged into one of the definitive sleepover movies: the camp pranks and the isolation cabin, Quaid's easy charm and Richardson's impossibly elegant warmth. It also launched Lohan toward Freaky Friday and Mean Girls, which gives the film a bittersweet time-capsule quality now — a perfect snapshot of everyone involved at their sunniest.