Back to the Future

Gotta get back in time! The ingenious time travel comedy Back to the Future is a pitch-perfect combination of sharp satire, warm sentiment and sci-fi excitement. Michael J. Fox plays 1985 teen Marty McFly, whose mentor, Doc Brown (a brilliantly manic Christopher Lloyd), invents a time-tripping DeLorean that takes the kid back to 1955. When he inadvertently gets in the way of his teenage parents’ relationship (and causes his future mother, played by Lea Thompson, to develop a crush on him!), Marty has to figure out how to give his nerdy father (a gloriously odd Crispin Glover) confidence and get them back together to insure his own eventual existence. Funny, touching and suspenseful, this Flux Capacitor-powered love letter to American pop culture is one of the most purely entertaining films of the 1980s. (Dir. by Robert Zemeckis, 1985, USA, 116 mins., Rated PG)