*batteries not included (1987)

Conceived by Steven Spielberg as a half-hour episode of Amazing Stories, this 1987 feature retains the shape of a fable. The East Village tenants of the Riley building form a tidy cross-section of late-century New York: an elderly couple losing their grip, a painter who cannot sell a canvas, a pregnant woman waiting on a man who does not deserve her, a retired boxer mopping floors. Frank McRae and Elizabeth Peña occupy their roles with an ease that never announces itself as an agenda. The tiny saucer-shaped visitors arrive, repair the cafe, and the picture settles into the gentle business of family entertainment.

Where the film carries a genuine charge is in its treatment of property. Lacey wants the block cleared for a skyscraper. Carlos, the thug he hires, is fired for failing to deliver, then burns the building down out of spite. The script grants him a moment of conscience, and the closing image, the restored cafe dwarfed by towers, reads as an indictment of what gets built and who gets crushed beneath it. That is class resentment dressed in Amblin warmth, and it lands harder than the mechanical creatures ever do.

Elsewhere the ledger is thin. There is no LGBTQ presence, no environmental concern, no body-positivity messaging, and Faye's dementia is treated as a sorrow to be borne, not an identity to celebrate. Marisa's decision to send her boyfriend away is a character beat, not a manifesto. The moral is demonstrated, never preached. Decades on, the film remains a modest, sweet-natured artifact whose politics arrive through the walls instead of the pulpit.