Starring: Walter Matthau, Tatum O’Neal, Vic Morrow

Walter Matthau is Morris Buttermaker, an alcoholic and former minor league baseball playing tasked with coaching the worst little league team in all of Southern California, The Bears. Comprised of such talents as a near-sighted pitcher, an overweight catcher, and a foul-mouthed shortstop, The Bears need a little help and it comes in the form of Amanda Whurlizer (gasp, a girl!) played by Tatum O’Neal. With a sharp tongue and top-notch pitching skills, she helps the unlikely bunch get into the playoffs. All wrapped up in the politics and community of baseball, the kids in The Bad News Bears act like adults while the adults act like kids and all have a lot of growing up to do. Play Ball!

Starring: Geena Davis, Lori Petty, Tom Hanks, Madonna, Rosie O’Donnell, John Lovitz

Who says girls can’t play baseball? Penny Marshall’s A League of Their Own takes a comedic look at the sexes through the development of America’s first professional baseball league during World War II.

A League of Their Own is a fictionalized (and funny) version of the real-life All-American Girls Professional Baseball League during WWII. In the film, candy manufacturer Walter Harvey (Gary Marshall) realizes that while the men are overseas fighting, baseball needs to remain America’s favorite pastime. So he starts the Rockford Peaches team getting sisters Dottie Hinson (Geena Davis) and Kit Keller (Lori Petty), “All the Way” Mae Mordabito (Madonna) and her best friend, Doris Murphy (Rosie O’Donnell), along with other talented ladies. Tom Hanks plays the washed-up baseball star Jimmy Dugan who coaches the team and, along with rising star Dottie, makes the team beloved to fans.

Before Sex and the City and Mad About You, Sarah Jessica Parker and Helen Hunt were just 1980s high school girls in Chicago looking for some dancing fun. 

Janey Gleen (SJP) is thrilled that her father has transferred the family to Chicago because it’s home to her favorite dance show Dance TV…and wouldn’t you guess it, she loves to dance! With her new BFF in tow, Lynne Stone (Helen Hunt), Janey gets out on a totally outrageous 80s adventures full of boys, prudish nuns, mean rich girls, and disapproving father on the journey to get in some on-air dancing time! It’s Footloose meets Cyndi Lauper!

The persistent memory of his involvement in the deaths of his wife and daughter come back to haunt Michael Courtland in a very real way.

Unhinged and unable to forgive himself for the part he played in the deaths of his kidnapped wife and daughter, New Orleans real estate developer Michael Courtland (Cliff Robertson) winds up on a treacherous journey through the haunting and constructed fiction of memories. The traumatic occurrences of losing his family repeat themselves after he re-marries a much younger woman who is, rather eerily, a spitting image of his former wife. Admittedly influenced by Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Obsession’s structure folds in on itself as the narrative twists and turns to reveal a terrifying truth.

Part of Nitehawk’s THE WORKS – BRIAN DE PALMA series.

Starring: Bill Murray, Andie MacDowell, Chris Elliott

One could expect that Groundhog Day would be an exercise in tedium. Fortunately, and we can all thank the comedic god that is Bill Murray for this, the film is a hilarious joy ride through the peaks and valleys of life. Even the greatest days are best left to live only once but feeling doomed in the repetitive cycle of the same is enough to drive anyone nuts. Trapped in time, Phil Connors (Bill Murray) eventually navigates his way through the Groundhog Day(s) and gets to the other side.

A young boy befriends a lovable extraterrestrial (who loves Reeses Pieces, no less) in this science fiction adventure for kids!

Fear of the unknown mixed with intolerance of the unfamiliar are at the heart of Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi family film about a lone alien stranded in an everyday town. When Elliot, himself a lonely and alienated young kid, finds E.T. (a harmless botanist on a mission from another planet) in his background neither himself nor his neighborhood will ever be the same. This discovery will ultimately offer valuable life lessons on confidence, friendship, family, loyalty, and loss for the boy.

Phone home.

“Supernatural, perhaps. Baloney, perhaps not. There are many things under the sun.”

King of the B’s Edgar G. Ulmer directors horror legends Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi in this modernist post-WW1 revenge story.

Although named after Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Black Cat,” Ulmer’s film essentially breaks away from that storyline (although Lugosi’s character has a morbid fear of cats) to dive into the heart of post-war trauma. After Newlyweds Peter and Joan Alison, along with stranger Dr. Vitus Werdegast (Bela Lugosi) survive a car crash in Eastern Europe, they wind up at the modernist masterpiece of Hjalmar Poelzig (Boris Karloff). This structure has been built upon the graves of soldiers and houses many ill deeds…it’s also the planned final destination of Werdegast. He has returned to the site of such horrors after decades of being a prisoner of war to seek revenge upon the treacherous Poelzig; who has done more evil than Werdegast can even imagine.

It’s hard to believe that with so many shocking points (incest, Satanism, necrophilia, and skinning someone alive) that The Black Cat is at a brilliantly slow pace, but it is. The surrounding architecture provides the perfect stark background in which the old and new worlds collide.

With an introduction by Adam Lowenstein, author of Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film, and free “Green Beast” cocktails by Pernod Absinthe!

Death does not deter a young soldier from returning home after being killed in Vietnam.

I died for you…the least you can do is die for me.

Bob Clark (of Black Christmas and A Christmas Story fame) reworks the parable “A Monkey’s Paw” into post-Vietnam suburbia in Deathdream (also known as Dead of Night). Deathdream plays out the horrors coming home after Vietnam along with other horror films of the era like like Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Last House on the Left but does so as a ghost story. In the beginning scene we see Andy Brooks killed in a Vietnam battle while his mother refuses to believe that his lack of communication means he is dead. Much to his family’s surprise, Andy shows up on their doorstep but something is terribly amiss. Starring Faces couple John Marley and Lynn Carlin, Deathdream puts to task America’s reluctance to deal with the trauma it brings upon itself while also showing the limitless boundaries of family love.

Thanks to Pernod Absinthe for the complimentary “The Green Beast” cocktails!

Once again, when a new villain wreaks havoc on Gotham City, Batman takes the rap!

Originally scheduled for a straight-to-video release, the final result of Batman: Mask of the Phantasm was so awesome that the studio demanded it be shown in the theaters. This animated centers around a new mysterious vigilante systematically eliminating Gotham’s crime bosses who, because of their smokey appearance, everyone believes is Batman. And, of course, there’s a complication for Batman’s alter-ego Bruce Wayne when a long lost love, Andrea Beaumont, re-enters his life. Will he be able to catch the bad guy, clear his name, and find romance? Watch and find out!

Starring: Jeff Bridges, Bruce Boxleitner, David Warner, Cindy Morgan

When talented computer engineer Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) finds out that Ed Dillinger (David Warner), an executive at his company, has been stealing his work, he tries to hack into the system. However, Flynn is transported into the digital world, where he has to face off against Dillinger’s computerized likeness, Sark, and the imposing Master Control Program. Aided by Tron (Bruce Boxleitner) and Yori (Cindy Morgan), Flynn becomes a freedom fighter for the oppressed programs of the grid.