The movie that made time travel cool.

Rating: 9/10 (21 October 2012)

Recipe for fun: take one teenaged boy from 1985, a "mad" scientist who's obsessed with finally getting his 30-year experiment to work, and a very special Delorean--mix in some family troubles and a complicated love triangle; cut in some quotable dialog; heat it up with plenty of action; remove from the '80s and let cool in the '50s; and top it all with Huey Lewis and the News.
There may be one or two people left on the planet who don't know the plot to Back to the Future. Okay: Young Marty is accidentally sent back in Doc Brown's Delorean from 1985 to 1955 and has to contact eccentric Doc's 30-years-younger version to help him get back to the future. (See what I did there? Clever, right?) Marty's biggest challenge is to not change anything in his past that could adversely affect the future -- say, preventing his mom and dad from falling in love, which would jeopardize his very existence. OOops! That's already messed up, so now he must correct the mishap or he'll disappear before he can get back to 1985.
Every element of Back to the Future works to create the coolest comedy of its decade. The comic situations that result from Marty trying to play matchmaker to his own parents are very well-played. Of course the best fun comes in when we get to experience (and in some cases, re-experience) the '50s from an '80s perspective. All these good times are helped along by having the easily likable Michael J Fox in the lead and the incomparable Christopher Lloyd as the hyperactive Doc -- a role he was born to play. Unflagging, quotable dialog powers the plot wonderfully.
Back to the Future is the kind of movie that can appeal to anybody from ages 10 to 100. When I saw this in the theater in '85 it was an instant hit across all cliques from the nerds to the jocks -- my generation's primer on time travel movies. I remember laughing right along with my mom and my little sisters. Not that many films manage to pull off that kind of magic, then or now.