one of my absolute favorites!

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

This was a family film in the '80s and...whatever happened to legit family films? I remember going to the movies to see this and then renting it when it came out on VHS and....my mom liked it as much as I did...and my dad liked it as much as I did.And as an adult today I still like it for reasons that are not entirely nostalgic...it's a great movie.Now I take my nephews to a family film and...I discover it's a kids film. It deals with purely childish things and...even they are a little bored with them sometimes. Once they grow out of the "paw patrol" stage in life."batteries not included" was actually deep enough to hold interests. It had things for children and adults with a theme that both age groups could like...All age groups could like.You don't get that anymore, like Hollywood assumes our collective IQ's have fallen and that anything not made for rugrats will traumatize a child over 5.Watch it with your family...and then feel horrible about what entertainment has come to

Apartment block tenants seek the aid of alien mechanical life-forms to save their building from demolition.This story started out as something destined for "Amazing Stories", and you can tell that it maintained the feel when expanded in length. It still has that sentimental nature Spielberg loves and packed the show with, and it just has that sort of light-hearted fantasy you don't see very often.Aside from the two leads -- Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy -- the cast is largely unknown, and that may not be a bad thing (though it is disappointing that they didn't go on to become bigger names). This isn't a "star" film, it's about regular people helping each other out.

Elderly couple Frank (Hume Cronyn) and Faye Riley (Jessica Tandy) who is suffering from dementia run a small diner in an old apartment building. The NYC neighborhood is being torn down. Thugs led by Carlos hired by property developer Lacey and his henchman Kovacs (John Pankow) are pushing the tenants out. The tenants include pregnant Marisa Esteval (Elizabeth Peña), former boxer Harry Knoble (Frank McRae) and starving artist Mason Baylor desperate to save the building. The cops refuse to help. A couple of small UFOs arrive and change everything.This definitely has the tone of an old Disney family film. Like those movies, this is strictly family fare which does tackle some slightly darker issues. The tone can be a little awkward at times for modern audiences but it absolutely works for this film. The special effects are terrific for the time. This features Brad Bird who contributed to his first theatrical screenplay in this.

I remember this film from the '80s and recently bought it on DVD, and it is still an original and fresh idea and a very sweet story. The main characters are an elderly couple Frank and Faye. Faye is unfortunately suffering the early effects of dementia and her husband Frank is her carer. These two characters are very sympathetically written and acted and have a believable backstory -- they have lived all their married life in the ageing city building they are in the story, where they run a café, but now developers want them out so they can demolish the building. The other characters are less developed and not so interesting, a retired boxer, a painter, and a pregnant woman who has a long-distance relationship with the father of her foetus, so the focus is really on the elderly couple. It is refreshing to see a film about this kind of relationship, rather than yet another soggy romance or a generic story about kids as a character backdrop to this kind of fantasy story.The *other* characters in the story are a pair, and later a family, of benevolent biomechanical creatures who construct a nest out of junk on the roof and start repairing broken items about the place and eating others. Some people in other reviews have identified these creatures as 'aliens' or 'spaceships'. While it is speculated initially by the other characters that the creatures may be spaceships for 'tiny aliens' or come from other worlds, when one of them is studied under a magnifying glass by a character, he sees lots of little circuits, and not 'tiny aliens' and since the creatures mate and give birth to offspring this would suggest they are living organisms in their own right. There is also not really anything to support the idea of them being of extraterrestrial origin, and it's probably more likely they are something that came about as part experiment, part natural evolution on Earth, although the question of where they come from is never addressed.A few people have also claimed this film rips off ET and a film called Cocoon. 'ET' is a story about a boy finding an alien creature. I have not seen 'Cocoon' so I read a synopsis of it, and it is a story about elderly people finding a fountain of eternal youth created by aliens. 'Batteries Not Included' to me is nothing like either of these. It is an urban fantasy version of the 'pixies down the garden' trope with an '80s twist on the pixies. And I enjoyed it when I first saw it, and I enjoyed it again more recently. It's a sweet, quirky story and a clever idea.It's a shame it isn't a better-known film, but I suspect there are reasons for that, and there are some problems with it as a film meant to appeal to family audiences. Firstly, the story about Faye's Alzheimer's, even though it is a refreshing change, is by its nature grim. Although the story ends happily, I am left with the expectation that Faye's condition will inevitably deteriorate soon to the point that Frank can no longer care for her and they can't continue to live together in the home they have spent their life in. A similarly grim theme is that when the biomechanical mother gives birth to her 'chicks' one of them is stillborn, although it is later revived by one of the human characters, which is sweet, but young children may get upset or not understand the birth scene.The second problem is the main antagonist, a thug hired by the developer to evict the residents of the property, in that he is extremely violent, breaking into the property wielding axes and cudgels and threatening the residents and smashing up their property. Halfway through the film he unprovokedly attacks, and apparently kills, the father of the little biomechanical family (although he is later repaired by his mate) in a scene that would likely be deeply upsetting for young children, and towards the end he violently assaults a man and sets fire to the building, before somewhat redeeming himself by rescuing Faye from the burning ruins.In summary, this is a delightful film, but may be unsuitable for young or sensitive children due to the violence in what would otherwise be quite a gentle story, and some darker themes.