Red Dawn (1984)

This is what we call a movie-movie, a movie that throws nuance and self-consciousness and artiness to the wind and concentrates on the slam-bam. It's richly entertaining, it's big, it moves fast. [10 Aug 1984, p.C1]

What if Reagan’s America got a taste of her own interventionist foreign policies? Apocalypse, wow.

It's pure American corn but expertly and entertainingly harvested. The casting is excellent, the performances are so good and the emotional thrust of the film so strong that it is impossible not to enjoy. [10 Aug 1984]

The film has some truly great right-wing anarchic moments, bur for the most part its politics are all too predictably – and only – militaristic, misogynist, racist, and xenophobic; for too much of its running time, it’s just a childishly simplistic masturbatory fantasy for right-wing hebephrenics that’s mostly safe enough to play the White House.

Red Dawn is at once a mainstream shoot ‘em up action picture and an ideologically demented exercise in American paranoia.