Rocky IV (1985)

What started out as an artistically strong though populist work of the second golden age of cinema, has by this point in the franchise become pure Reaganite movie making. Here you have a Soviet bad guy, a talking robot, lots o’ angry fighting, and an excess of musical anthems. The quality of this film is unarguably below that of its predecessors, yet it’s extreme 1985ishness makes it hard for me not to just love. I’ll limit myself to what aught to be a generous three, but I kind of want to give it a four, if not more. Dolph Lundgren’s only slightly more personable then a block of granite, but an excellent turn by the Gorbachev impersonator.