80s Movies: Honey, I Shrunk The Kids (1989)

I won't lie - the end of the 80s was a tragic event in my life. I was 7, and just starting a bigger school, which was really the start of feeling like a social pariah. Harsh times for a little person. Luckily for me, I hadn't been shrunk to a microscopic size and hurled into the jungle of my own back yard, like the young cast of Honey, I Shrunk The Kids.

Parents Rick Moranis and Marcia Strassman as Wayne and Diane Szalinski play a central role, holding things together in the big world, but the real action is with the little people in what is, at its core, a fairly epic adventure movie. Let's take a moment to appreciate the four child stars: Robert Oliveri (Nick Szalinski), Amy O'Neill (Amy Szalinski), Jared Rushton (Ron Thompson) and Thomas Wilson Brown (Russ Thompson).

80s Movies: Batman (1989)

Batman is my favourite superhero - along with Doctor Who and James Bond, he's one of my few real fictional role models in life. It's the fact that he doesn't have any actual special powers that I like - he's just a man, with a man's courage. OK, that's Flash Gordon, but what Batman does have is an arsenal of rich-boy toys that all seem to fit on to a single belt, and a very, very nice car.

It's also a sign of the times, for me at least, that 1989's Batman was so very, very good, with just the right balance of dark humour and pure darkness itself, while the sequels fell back into the ruinous camp style of the TV series. Compare the psychological thriller style of the first movie - albeit with superhero action scenes interspersed - with the comic-book Batman and Robin (1997) and it pretty much sums up what went wrong in the 1990s as far as big-screen entertainment was concerned.