Interesteg What makes it different from others?

Inclubabu Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.

Hadrina The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Payno I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

slightlymad22 Continuing my plan to watch every Tom Cruise movie in order, I come to to his third and final movie of 1983, All The Right Moves.Plot In A Paragraph: A high school football player (Cruise) desperate for a scholarship and his headstrong coach clash in a dying Pennsylvania steel town.Like with Risky Business, this is another movie that I don't get people's love for. I find it watchable, and nothing more. Cruise is OK, everyone's favourite TV coach, Craig T Nelson is his usual reliable self, and Leah Thompson (who shares the most unsexy and uncomfortable life scene I have ever witnessed) looks cute, but doesn't really bring much. One plus is, it has a decent rock soundtrack, which is usually listed first in the end credits with each song stating what scene it was played it. This was the first movie Tom Cruise's name appeared above the movie title on a poster.All The Right Moves grossed $17 million at the domestic box office, to end the year the 42nd highest grossing movie of 1983.

fishboy266 Actors are trying, but the director and writer appear to be going through the motions. Clichéd dialogue / story lines, and amped up dramatic background music (turn volume to 11!) do not a good movie make.People in this movie look overly self-conscious that they ARE in a movie, even background people (eyes shift nervously everywhere, BUT toward the camera, which made this viewer conscious that they were trying oh so hard to not look at the camera! very distracting!).Cliché, cliché, cliché... like being forced to watch Iron Eagle.. yuck.way too much like An Officer and a Gentleman in Pennsylvania!probably why this guy never directed another major movie after this and Clan of the Cave Bear (1986)...He and/or his bosses must have realized he was out of his element.

Michael_Elliott All the Right Moves (1983) *** (out of 4) Nice slice-of-life drama about a high school football player (Tom Cruise) living in a small PA town where there's not much hope for a future except for getting a scholarship. He eventually gets thrown off the team by his coach (Craig T. Nelson) and soon realizes that his entire life might have just got thrown away. Even though the story is quite predictable, this is still a pretty entertaining little movie that actually has a lot more grit than you might expect. Cruise was still wet behind the ears and he certainly doesn't give a great performance but I thought he handled the role of this poor kid trying to get out of a failed life pretty well. Cruise certainly faired a lot better during some of the more dramatic scenes and his relationship with Lea Thompson, who plays his girlfriend here, was quite good as well. Thompson comes off very natural here and it really does feel like they were playing a real couple going through real problems. Chris Penn is also pretty good in his small supporting role. The film belongs to Nelson though and it's a real shame that he didn't have more screen time as he and Cruise work extremely well together and for my money the heart of the story was in their relationship yet for some reason it's not explored as deep as it should have been. The ending is quite predictable and you'll see it coming from a mile away but it was still touching in its own right. Director Chapman really doesn't shy away from many of the subjects and I thought it fairly looked at life in a small town via kids not wanting to turn out like their parents and how the majority of them are given up for dead even before they're out of school. The film contains a nice bit of drama from start to finish and it's certainly worth viewing even if it's not one of the greatest sports movies out there.

Robert J. Maxwell I was about ready to log off on this movie by the end of the first half hour or so. A teen movie that takes it characters and values seriously. The coach of a high school football team, Craig Nelson, in western Pennsylvania must lead the team to victory to land a better job. Tom Cruise, the star of the team, needs to finish high school with an unblemished record in order to win a football scholarship to college and leave Ampipe. (That's the name of the industrial Appalachian town -- Ampipe, as in American Pipe and Steel Company.) Oh, there are all sorts of conflicts. The coach has no tolerance for failure. He calls it quitting. And he thinks in nominal scales -- you're either with the team or against it. And he really believes this crap. And Tom Cruise has an attitude problem. He loses his cool when he's angry and shouts impulsively when he should be keeping his mouth shut.Then there is Cruise's girl, Lea Thompson, a tiny thing who loves Cruise as much as he loves her. But they have a problem too. She believes that if Cruise leaves high school for a distant college, while she is still a junior with another year to go, she'll lose him to someone else. Further, she's envious of Cruise's chances of getting a football scholarship while she, a musician, has little such hope.I said the coach believes the stuff he shouts to the team in the locker room and he really does. He gives pep talks about quitters being losers and we're all in this together. The context of these scenes seems to encourage the audience to accept this adolescent nonsense. And when Cruise's father is in a bar and someone spits in his face that, "Your son cost us the game!", and the old man pops the impudent natterer in the nose, we are clearly meant to cheer the petty violence.But then, the second half of the movie, while still groveling in corn, gets a little more interesting. Some sympathy is extended to the coach -- I won't bother describing it in detail -- when his house is trashed. Cruise who was peripheral to the incident apologizes but the coach has him pegged as a quitter and fires him from the team, causing a blemish to appear on Cruise's heretofore spotless record, and jeopardizing his chances of being awarded the scholarship that will free him from the hellish community he's part of.And what a dreary place it is. The drizzly weather, the shabby wooden tenements, the Gothic woods, the dripping hills, hover over the whole movie like a leaden cloud. You can practically smell the dismal rooms and trailers. See "Slap Shot" or "Coal Miner's Daughter" for other examples. Give me the studio-built, fairy-tale Appalachia of Howard Hawks' "Sergeant York" any day.The performances are neither outstandingly bad or unusually good. Lea Thompson is appealing enough with her girlish voice. Tom Cruise still has that piping high-schoolish voice and spends a good deal of time standing around open mouthed. Craig Nelson has the kind of presence that ought to lend itself to high morality or terpitude but the default position of his features is a simple frown. He's never able to get past that frown.Enough. Everything in it is predictable, including the happy ending. The coach is offered a job at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo and offers Cruise a scholarship there. I don't know how a newly hired football coach can offer anybody a scholarship, but there it is. The old fixeroo is in. You know, I'm not sure whether the coach was hired at Cal Tech or Cal Poly. Can't remember exactly. I hope it was Cal Poly because the campus is situated in such a pretty area -- the coast of central California -- and they have a marvelously comprehensive library. I managed to locate a book of mine in the card catalogue. Yes, a nice place.