My all-time favorite movie turns 30 years old this weekend, and Vox’s Todd VanDerWerff’s takes a look at what makes it so special:
Back to the Future works because, in the end, its stakes are so very small. Beneath all the jokes and the moments where a mother unknowingly flirts with her son and the time travel and the action-packed countdown sequences, all that remains is a theme so universal that we keep returning to it in story after story after story: can you ever understand your parents? And perhaps even harder: can they ever understand you?