The Final Countdown (1980) Review
USS Nimitz time-travels to day before Pearl Harbor. Authentic F-14 Tomcat sequences.
Tag: 1980s (Page 13)
1980sTime Bandits (1981) Review
Terry Gilliam's droll British time travel fantasy. Six dwarves with stolen map of holes in time.
1980sAngel (1984) and the Franchise Review
Donna Wilkes, Rory Calhoun, Susan Tyrrell, and pre-gentrification Hollywood Boulevard. Exploitation cinema that survives in spite of itself.
1980sThe Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (BBC TV Series, 1981) Review
Peter Jones as the Book, Douglas Adams's voice intact, and the Vogon poetry torture. Dated, charming, better than the movie.
1980sHoney, I Shrunk the Kids (1989) Review
Rick Moranis at his peak, practical effects that put CGI to shame, and Disney back when it made original family adventures. The Blu-ray release is out of print and trades at collector prices.
1980sFerris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) Review
Matthew Broderick, Alan Ruck, and John Hughes's most ambitious teen film. Ferris narrates Cameron's story.
1980sThe Breakfast Club (1985) Review
Five teenagers, one library, one Saturday detention. John Hughes's bottle-episode masterpiece with Paul Gleason as the principal.
1980sFast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) Review
Sean Penn as Spicoli, Cameron Crowe's undercover research, Amy Heckerling's first feature. The 9 reflects what those viewings have confirmed: the film is the founding document of the modern American teen comedy and one of the most influential teen films…
1980sDie Hard (1988) Review
Bruce Willis, Alan Rickman as god-tier Hans Gruber, and one perfect Christmas Eve at Nakatomi Plaza. The rating is not negotiable.
1980sVice Squad (1982) – Review
Wings Hauser's Ramrod is one of genre cinema's genuinely frightening villains, casual, flat, and relentless across a single Hollywood night. That's not a bad place for a genre film to land, it means the ambition outpaced the execution in specific,…
1980sRoboCop (1987) Review
RoboCop is a better film than its premise suggests and a more subversive one than its marketing implied. Paul Verhoeven made a corporate satire inside a violent action film, and the two registers enhance each other instead of competing.
1980sThe Abyss (1989) Review
The production achievement of The Abyss is extraordinary even by Cameron's standards. The Deepcore rig is a superbly designed setting, confined, functional, full of the specific texture of working machinery that Cameron consistently brings to his industrial environments.