In the summer of 1982, an earthbound alien phoned home and audiences wept with joy, cementing Steven Spielberg’s reputation as the greatest film-maker of his generation. E.T: The Extra-Terrestrial was a cultural phenomenon that spoke to our inner child. Almost 30 years later, director JJ Abrams pays homage to it with Super 8, a rollicking adventure with echoes of The Goonies that depicts the rampage of an alien creature in rural 1970s America from the perspective of six children whose worlds have just been rocked by Star Wars and Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

In a sleepy town in Ohio, teenager Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney) is struggling to come to terms with the death of his mother and the strain on his father, Deputy Sheriff Jackson Lamb (Kyle Chandler). The youngster invests his time in making a low-budget zombie film with his friends. Director Charles (Riley Griffiths) bosses everyone around while special effects expert Cary (Ryan Lee) provides the fake gore. Dim leading man Martin (Gabriel Basso) tries to remember his lines to the chagrin of long-suffering sound-man Preston (Zach Mills).

Charles persuades classmate Alice (Elle Fanning) to sign up as lead actress and the children head down to the local station to shoot a night-time sequence. Just as the camera starts rolling, the youngsters witness a truck drive on to the tracks and derail an oncoming freight train. As they make a hasty escape, the trespassing teens are oblivious to the monstrous creature crawling free from the twisted wreckage.

Super 8 is a delightful nostalgia trip, recalling a bygone era when youngsters embarked on amazing journeys. You have to suspend your disbelief throughout Abrams’s film but as pure entertainment, there is much to enjoy from the amusing banter between the children to the first glimpse of the monster as a reflection in a puddle at a gas station while an unwitting attendant listens to Blondie’s Heart of Glass on his exciting new purchase — a Walkman.

The centrepiece train crash is brilliantly realised and the digitally-rendered behemoth is seamlessly integrated with the live action. Courtney is a spirited hero and he milks genuine tears as Joe wrestles with the loss of the woman who brought him into the world. Fanning is equally impressive and there is a lovely rapport between the two young actors and with co-stars Griffiths, Lee, Basso and Mills. Step back to 1982.

Thomas (Jim Carrey) is a workaholic real estate developer for the money-grabbing triumvirate Franklin (Philip Baker Hall), Reader (Dominic Chianese) and Yates (William C Mitchell) in Mr Popper’s Penguins. In order to secure promotion, Thomas must persuade Mrs Van Gundy (Angela Lansbury) to sell the Tavern on the Green restaurant in Central Park. She rebuffs his pitch, determined to sell the historic property to a person of worth. While he attempts to close the deal, Thomas receives his inheritance from his late father: six Gentoo penguins, which take over his life and rebuild bridges with ex-wife Amanda (Carla Gugino) and children Janie (Madeline Carroll) and Billy (Maxwell Perry Cotton).

Mr Popper’s Penguins is a saccharine family-oriented comedy, which conveys a message about parental responsibility and love triumphing over adversity with all the tenderness of a nasty case of frostbite. Carrey reins in his usual mugging and is completely upstaged by the real and digitally-rendered birds, who wreak havoc at a swanky party in the Guggenheim museum.

Carroll and Cotton tug heartstrings as the kids who want their father to choose them over his employment, while Gugino is a slave to the contrived narrative.