Movies That Mattered: More Reviews from a Transformative Decade

A movie that appeals to the family audience doesn’t really appeal to anyone; it gives neither parents nor children a reason to leave the television set, while children’s movies are alive and well and are known as network programming.

Where movies once were something that families could see together, most people now go to movies to get away from their families.

The gags in Used Cars are as tattered, crass, and intentionally second-rate as its subject matter, and they’re funny because they are so depressingly familiar. The humor taps into a collective unconscious of half-remembered kiddie shows, situation comedies, and B movies—the dregs of popular culture. There is no other humor to apply to this debased

Since Luke is the only likable character in the film, we know he isn’t long for its world.

William Cameron Menzies’s bizarre Invaders from Mars

Zemeckis and Gale have mastered the first rule of filmmaking: match the style to the substance.

As the sad case of Time Bandits demonstrates, there is something paradoxical, self-contradictory, built into the very notion of children’s films. They have to be made by adults and (at least partly) for adults. And yet, almost by definition, a good children’s film is one that keeps adults away: grown-ups should never be allowed to understand it.

It’s almost the Friday the 13th of art pictures.