Two very different Eighties movies

The Cotton Club: Richard Gere plays a mean trumpet, is a hit wit the ladeeez, and too much of a gentleman to take advantage of either. In other news, black people found it hard to break into the mainstream dance business in the 1930s, and New York had a number of ethnic mafias who carried out hits on each other. You'd think that with Francis Ford Coppola behind the camera and Larry Fishburne and Bob Hoskins in front of it, it would be a damn sight more interesting movie, but as it is, it's outclassed in all departments by Bugsy Malone.

Flight of the Navigator: Cute, if not terribly deep, 1980s sci-fi piece about a preteen boy who wakes up after a fall to find out that eight years have passed for everyone else but not for him; this turns out to have a connection to an alien spacecraft picked up by NASA, for which he, it seems, is the Navigator. The effects are variable (the spacecraft is good, the alien animals kind of puppety-looking), and the 1980s pop culture is either charmingly nostalgic or annoying, depending on how you feel (there's a gratuitous robot, a continual awestruck worship of NASA, a sub-Pet-Shop-Boys electropop tie-in single, and the protagonist's brother, as a teenager, punctuates his conversation with "dude", "rad" and "totally" to the point where one suspects Tourette's) . Keep an eye out for a teenage Sarah Jessica Parker.

Movie count for 2009: 105. Meaning I now average 2 movies a week.