The mid-eighties saw many protegees of Spielberg make a great number of truly creative, truly entertaining adventures, always with some element of the fantastic or sci-fi in them (much more fun as a rule than the gloomy adventures of the 2010s). Of these, Back to the Future is one of the most accomplished, and possibly the best time-travel movie ever made. Definitely something that you should share with your children!

You should know this; but in case you don’t (spoiler alert), the movie follows the story of Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox, in one of his most famous roles), the teenage son of underachieving parents, as he travels back in time to the 1950s, and accidentally causes his future mom to get a crush on him, which will in turn cause him to disappear from existence. So now he has to make his parents fall in love with each other, while fighting school bullies, finding a way to repair the time machine, and avoiding any further history mess-ups. On the way we are treated with buckets of out-of-time jokes, cool skateboard-action scenes, and a mounting tension, as at every turn of the road things gets increasingly difficult for Marty.

Nearly 30 years later, my kids still picked most of the humor, with the exception perhaps of some jokes based on political figures and celebrities (“Ronald Reagan is president?”) They found some of the effects “cheesy,” and the beginning felt a little slow. But soon they were caught in the mounting difficulties of Marty, and fell in love with the irresistible Doc, the eccentric, always intense inventor that envisions the ’80s like a Buck Rogers comic.

In short, the movie was a Blast from the Past.

For age-appropriateness, keep in mind that Marty’s mom tries to seduce him in a couple of occasions, and in a key scene, one of the bullies tries to, er, have his way with her. I mention this to avoid some awkwardness. I should also warn you against renting the sequels (BTF II and III). I sort of liked them in my time, but they get repetitive (most of the humor being based on repeating the same situations in a slightly different context), and the gags are too silly. My kids gave up early on them: they may have retroactively ruined their enjoyment of the first movie! Which means we’ll have to watch it again. Oh well…