The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (BBC TV Series, 1981) Review
May 11, 2026
Peter Jones as the Book, Douglas Adams's voice intact, and the Vogon poetry torture. Dated, charming, better than the movie.
Tag: 1980s (Page 13)
1980sHoney, I Shrunk the Kids (1989) Review
May 11, 2026
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
May 11, 2026
Matthew Broderick, Alan Ruck, and John Hughes's most ambitious teen film. Ferris narrates Cameron's story.
1980sThe Breakfast Club (1985) Review
May 11, 2026
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
May 11, 2026
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
May 11, 2026
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
March 21, 2026
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
March 20, 2026
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
March 20, 2026
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.
1980sPredator (1987) Review
March 20, 2026
The film is thrilling on its surface and interesting underneath, which is rarer in the action genre than the genre's reputation suggests. This is not a film that accidentally achieved something.
1980sThe Empire Strikes Back (1980) Review
March 20, 2026
Empire earns its 8 by doing what no Star Wars film before or since has managed: it takes the universe seriously. Lucas's original Star Wars is a myth engine, archetypes, simple morality, the pleasure of a world with clear rules.
1980sThe Thing (1982) Review
March 20, 2026
The Thing earns its 9.5 primarily through Rob Bottin's practical effects work, which remains the gold standard for creature design in horror cinema more than forty years later. Carpenter built something rare: a film where the monster is original, the…