1983-96

These reviews were written between 1983 and 1996, as each movie was released. The reviews were published in a nieghborhood weekly paper whose audience was primarily families. Aiming toward this somewhat conservative readership, I tried to describe how the movies' content might be offensive to certain viewers, when this was called for. [Keep in mind that my comments about potentially offensive material were written at the time I saw the movies; when I say something like "lots of vulgar language," by 21st century standards it might not be so bad.] I also tried to give suitability information, when appropriate, for parents. I had young children myself during this period. I scanned the reviews from the paper and converted them to webpages without doing much editing. Some of my opinions of some of these movies have changed over the years, but the reviews here remain as I wrote them on first viewing the films, with an occasional "hindsight note" added when I just couldn't resist it. The dates given with the reviews were the dates of publication.

For a few years in the middle of my movie critic "career" I published lists of favorite movies. Here are PDFs of those listings: 1984 • 1986 • 1987