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The 100 Best Films of the 1980s

The ’80s, if mainstream filmmaking from the era is any indication, might be called the decade of the body.

The 100 Best Films of the 1980s
Photo: Universal Pictures

In 2019, Billboard teamed up with SiriusXM to determine the 500 best songs of the 1980s, with Olivia Newton-John’s 1981 pop hit “Physical” topping the list. It’s an apt choice for many reasons, foremost among them that the ’80s, if mainstream American filmmaking from the era is any indication, might be called the decade of the body—of turning away from the more cerebral, auteurist cinema of the New Hollywood and toward star-driven genre vehicles, featuring the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tom Cruise, and Melanie Griffith, who in Brian De Palma’s delirious Body Double plays a porn star named—wait for it—Holly Body.

Conventional historical accounts of the decade see this transformation through the lens of box office, as studio practices tended toward market saturation, and stardom became dependent on the potential to make viewers feel rather than think. But that narrative overlooks the plethora of small, seedy gems made by Hollywood filmmakers starring well-known actors still vying to challenge audiences with daring visions of the modern world. Such as William Friedkin’s Cruising, Michael Mann’s Thief, and Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, whose nocturnal animals discover new, and often unwanted, shades of themselves while moving through city streets.

If the neon-lit cityscape is an essential image in ’80s films for the way it expresses the allure and danger of living by night, it also points up how a fear of AIDS—and its association with city life—leapt into the collective consciousness. Maybe that’s partly why Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner seems to epitomize ’80s aesthetics for many: The replicant, whose body often looks like an ideal and healthy human, is actually a machine. The city, though, need not be essential for the metaphor to work. In fact, author John Kenneth Muir argues that, in a film like John Carpenter’s The Thing, which is set in Antarctica, the necessity of a blood test to determine “what is really going on inside the human body” could be understood as a direct reference to the AIDS epidemic.

If that potentially sounds like a grim diagnosis of the decade’s films, it actually points to the vitality of the decade’s cinematic artistry, as filmmakers from across the globe emerged to share their haunted visions of sex, music, and voyeurism. In France, Jean-Jacques Beineix, Leos Carax, and Luc Besson each helped create cinéma du look as a hybrid strain of popular and art cinema with a lush visual style. Meanwhile, aging master Robert Bresson was making his last (and arguably finest) film. In Canada, David Cronenberg showed us how exploding heads, penetrative home video, and wayward twin gynecologists could encapsulate various maladies of the times. And in Taiwan, Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien were at the forefront of New Taiwanese Cinema, diagnosing the twin poles of urbanization and globalization as they started to define contemporary life.

The number of singular filmmakers who emerged in the decade is extensive. Auteurs such as Abbas Kiarostami and Souleymane Cissé created works that helped further introduce the realities of their respective countries to audiences around the globe, while, back in the U.S., Lizzie Borden and Donna Deitch were making their first feature films, each of which has endured as a classic of queer cinema. The decade’s films help us understand that, in order to see all titles of consequence, one needs to remain open to movies playing at the multiplex, the arthouse, and the grindhouse. The latter includes numerous slasher films, itself a subgenre enamored with the dangers and pleasures of the flesh. We must remember that, sometimes, wisdom comes from unlikely places, so consider this seemingly throwaway line from 1982’s The Slumber Party Massacre as words to live by: “It’s not the size of your mouth; it’s what’s in it that counts.” Clayton Dillard

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Editor’s Note: Many of the films on our list can be found on the Criterion Channel, Netflix, and TCM.


The Atomic Cafe

100. The Atomic Cafe (Jayne Loader and Kevin and Pierce Rafferty, 1982)

The Atomic Café would merely be a collage-like parody of Cold War paranoia if it didn’t foreground its more satirical depictions of American hubris and buffoonery alongside horrifying images of the aftermath of atomic attacks on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The juxtaposition reinforces how the perplexing behaviors of ignorant politicians are only funny when one isn’t immediately in harm’s way as a result. As directed by Jayne Loader, Kevin Rafferty, and Pierce Rafferty, the film runs the gamut of documentary footage, educational videos, and cultural detritus relating to atomic hysteria from the 1950s, with Anthony Rizzo’s 1952 social guidance film Duck and Cover becoming the headliner for announcing how helpless and laughable humanity often looks when confronting its imminent destruction. Dillard


Desert Hearts

99. Desert Hearts (Donna Deitch, 1985)

The lesbian relationship at the core of Donna Deitch’s Desert Hearts is contextualized by its characters’ ideological hang-ups, whether related to region, education, or sexuality, which inform the entire spectrum of their identities. Whereas Brokeback Mountain reduced its protagonists’ gay romance to the looming certainty of violence and tragedy in order to garner cheap pathos, Donna Deitch’s Desert Hearts reads between the lines of desire and self-assessment to locate the liminal place where the notion of personal identity begins and ends. That such a process entails convincing the self of its value as much it does convincing others is one of the film’s central arguments. At a casino, an unnamed woman leans over to Vivian (Helen Shaver), who’s scoping out the slot machines, and says that if one doesn’t play, one doesn’t win. Take that as the mantra of Desert Hearts, which advocates risk and consciousness in tandem as the only means to overcome the cold, repressive hand of so-called normative thought. Dillard


The Sacrifice

98. The Sacrifice (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1986)

Like Alexander (Erland Josephson), who inexorably moves toward an act that’s both foolhardy and awe-inspiring, The Sacrifice eventually transcends the flaws in its design. In its second half, the film embraces a dream logic that captures its protagonist’s mix of woozy terror and almost childlike guilelessness more elegantly than any of his early verbal musings could. Formal strategies that at first serve to demarcate states of reverie—from the use of slow motion and black-and-white stock footage, to disruptions in visual perspective and spatial clarity—start to impinge on the ostensible reality of the narrative space until the film inhabits a hallucinatory middle ground where an anemic bluish gray is the predominant shade. In doing so, Andrei Tarkovsky gives form to Alexander’s breakdown of rationality and adoption of a messianic state. Regardless of whether or not one accepts the legitimacy of his actions—Tarkovsky asks only that we respect his profound conviction—there should be little doubt as to the depth of his despair. Carson Lund

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Laputa: Castle in the Sky

97. Castle in the Sky (Hayao Miyazaki, 1986)

Castle in the Sky is more beholden to formula than we now expect from Japanese animation maestro Hayao Miyazaki, but the dreamy brilliance of his later pictures was already beginning to take shape here, and the picture still has a marvelous swiftness of invention that shames contemporary sci-fi action extravaganzas. Most filmmakers lurch from one tone to the next—action here, comedy there, with a handy, usually hypocritical, ecological capper to send everyone out of the theaters feeling productive. Castle in the Sky is an adventure picture firstly and mostly, but Miyazaki’s concerns with the fragility and wonder of our less tangible surroundings haunt the picture without overpowering it. Miyazaki, even three pictures in, can land his blows softly. Amid the adventure, lovely retro stuff with pirates and various war-crafts battling it out in the blue skies, lies chilling little details that linger after the picture is over: a miner’s defeated regret over a lost mineral, a bad guy’s disgust with the beautiful labyrinth of flowers growing up around an ancient weapon, the titular floating island’s emergence from the clouds. The details of the world give the film texture and originality. Chuck Bowen


Mon Oncle d’Amérique

96. Mon Oncle d’Amérique (Alain Resnais, 1980)

Alain Resnais’s Mon Oncle d’Amérique is a seamless fusion of fiction and documentary. The documentary portion is composed of interviews with physician and philosopher Henri Laborit as he discusses theories on human behavior and brain function. And these theories come to inform and enrich the fictional narrative of three intersecting lives: Janine (Nicole Garcia) an actress; Jean (Roger Pierre), a TV network developer and writer; and René (Gérard Depardieu), a factory manager. Janine and Jean are lovers, while Janine and René engage in business dealings. One of Mon Oncle d’Amérique’s most delightful elements is that each person closely identifies with a different French cinema star: Janine with Jean Marais, Jean with Danielle Darrieux, and René with Jean Gabin. In moments of tension, Resnais frequently cuts to scenes from those actors’ films, their gestures perfectly mirroring and evoking the feelings of the protagonists. Laborit proposes that, from the moment we’re born, we’re programmed on how to behave and function within society. Thus the lines between the past and future are tenuous—not only through the non-linearity of the film’s storytelling, but via the suggestion that our personal past, as well as the collective and assimilated past of humanity, pre-programs and in a way limits our future. Veronika Ferdman


Lost in America

95. Lost in America (Albert Brooks, 1985)

Albert Brooks’s Lost in America is a Reagan-era film that’s uncomfortable with our dependence on advertising and material possessions and with our fealty to the notion of actualizing ourselves with professional success. Throughout, Brooks finds the subtext of a scene, explodes it, and moves on before we’ve had a chance to digest his startling observations. As uproarious as the film frequently is, it’s also driven by the visceral terror of financial collapse, and Brooks allows the comedy to evolve into an acknowledgement of barely latent violence. And it remains resonant because it doesn’t superficially indict David Howard (Brooks) and his wife, Linda (Julie Hagerty), rewarding our unearned feelings of superiority. Brooks criticizes yet empathizes with the couple’s yearning to prove that they aren’t simply puppets on a corporate stage, and, in its way, this film is as searching and searing an exploration of a relationship in crisis as any that Ingmar Bergman produced. David and Linda are automatons who ironically achieve individuality by embracing conformity. Bowen


Sweetie

94. Sweetie (Jane Campion, 1989)

Mixing the hothouse environment of a Tennessee Williams drama with surreal, Kahlo-esque portraiture, Sweetie introduces Jane Campion as a world-class filmmaker from the start. The New Zealand auteur’s feature debut is a bifurcated character study of two sisters whose addled relationships to the world around them are as similarly chaotic as they are differently oriented. Mousy introvert Kay (Karen Colston) immediately exudes such terror over human interaction that her affair with a married man at the start of the film registers as wildly out of character. Meanwhile, her gregarious sister, Sweetie (Geneviève Lemon), is a perpetual child, willing to harm herself and others if she receives an insufficient amount of attention from others. With acidic humor, their dysfunction is further unpacked when the pair visit their parents, which brings to light the Elektra complexes and uneven distribution of parental affections that shaped them. Campion’s early shorts showed an almost preternatural mastery of film grammar, and here she uses angled compositions and varying focal lenses to distort the dimensions of her characters, giving people indefinite, funhouse-mirror dimensions reflective of their grotesque inner turmoil. Jake Cole

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On the Silver Globe

93. On the Silver Globe (Andrzej Żuławski, 1988)

Started in 1976 as an epic adaptation of a turn-of-a-century philosophical sci-fi trilogy by the director’s great uncle, production on Andrzej Żuławski’s On the Silver Globe was abruptly stopped by Poland’s communist ministry of culture in 1977. Officially too expensive to continue, the film was in fact too politically incorrect to handle. It wasn’t until 1987 that Żuławski was allowed to tinker with the incomplete footage and assemble it into what it currently is: “a stump of a movie,” per his off-screen opening remark. The film presents itself both as a narrative and an essay upon its own making. The literal plot, having to do with a group of space travelers discovering a new planet and building a civilization from scratch, is juxtaposed with documentary footage of the crumbling failed experiment that was communist Poland. On the Silver Globe is immensely rich as an act of philosophical inquiry. Its dialogue full of expertly disguised nuggets borrowed from the likes of Norman Mailer and Karl Marx, the film is a desperate meditation on the hunger for religion, as well as our shared need of submitting ourselves to figures of authority. As such, it’s probably the bravest Polish film ever made. Michał Oleszczyk


Querelle

92. Querelle (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1982)

Adapted from Jean Genet’s Querelle of Brest, the prolific Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s final film saw him addressing familiar themes of betrayal and power relations. Only this time the setting is a wildly theatricalized port called Brest, a mythical dominion where the borders of identity are patrolled and blurred. And at the center of it all is an impossibly beautiful thief and murderer, Querelle (Brad Davis), to whom everyone is drawn, and who’s an embodiment of every agony that possessed Genet and chased him throughout his life. The whole thing plays out in a kind of liminal space, where pain becomes inseparable from pleasure. Fassbinder’s style is one of multitudes, at once dreamlike and nightmarish, rigorous yet fluid, suggesting a memory being willed into beautiful being before its maker takes his last breath. Ed Gonzalez


Meantime

91. Meantime (Mike Leigh, 1983)

Meantime already finds Mike Leigh in full command of his brand of working-class tragicomedy. Leigh captures the restless, maddening, emasculating, demoralizing stench of poverty and unemployment with an acuity and piquancy that’s nearly unrivaled in cinema. He understands the distilled rage such living conditions trigger, recognizing this rage for what it actually is: bottled energy that can’t be released. Seeking to exorcise this anger, the Pollocks are always engaged in domestic squabbling for its own sake, which follows a circular structure and grants no relief, only intensifying the futility of a situation that’s characterized by broken windows and faulty washing machines and purposeless waiting and wandering in bars and slums. In the context Leigh provides, we understand why someone would become a skinhead, seeking a righteous inner purging via social belonging that refutes the gilded indifference of the Thatcher administration. A shot of Coxy screaming and thrashing about in a large metal barrel could serve as the film’s master image. Bowen


Predator

90. Predator (John McTiernan, 1987)

For its thematic richness alone, John McTiernan’s Predator outmatches almost ever other Hollywood sci-fi action film of the ’80s. Upon first seeing the lethal, translucent creature that brutally murdered their friends and fellow soldiers, Dutch (Arnold Shwarzenegger) and the men on his elite military team unleash a flurry of heavy gunfire into the jungle, destroying much of the surrounding vegetation. It’s a powerful image, evoking the all-consuming force of American military might, and it plays, like so much of the film, on the collective fear of the unknown. The unbridled machismo of the era pervades the entirety of Predator, amplified in the form of muscular handshakes and legendary quips like “I ain’t got time to bleed,” but the mysterious, oft-invisible enemy handily deflates all that masculine energy. It’s telling that as the Predator and Dutch inevitably go mano a mano, the only lines spoken are when both ask the other “What the hell are you?” Derek Smith

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Repo Man

89. Repo Man (Alex Cox, 1984)

The utter weirdness of Alex Cox’s remarkable debut—a document of L.A.’s hardcore punk scene that’s also an ode to its car culture, a critique of the American middle class, and a kind-of sci-fi comedy about a radioactive Chevy Malibu—would seem to preclude its existence. And yet here it is. More than 30 years later, the film is no worse for the wear. Not so much ahead of its time as outside of it, the film’s L.A. punk particularities have broadened over the years. Its ennui has endured not just as a portrait of a certain generation of angry adolescents, but as one of angry adolescence writ large. Bland white-and-blue cans labeled “lite beer” and “yellow cling sliced peaches” may seem like blunderingly flagrant critiques of capital, but their blatancy is only commensurate with the brazenness of capital itself. Like the sunglasses in Carpenter’s film that magically demystify the existent authoritarian infrastructure by stripping it to its scaffolding, peeling the flesh from the well-dressed power bloc and paring down mock-complex billboards to marching order edicts like “CONSUME” and “OBEY,” Repo Man’s extra-barefaced signposts are in place to productively hail a generation that’s been beaten down under the boot heel of obviousness. John Semley


Near Dark

88. Near Dark (Kathryn Bigelow, 1987)

Kathryn Bigelow’s second feature film, Near Dark revels in the irony of vampires sucking dry cowboys who, themselves, plunder land for resources. A blossoming vampire drinks from his lover/mentor’s wrist as they stand underneath an oil rig, and, earlier, a mosquito famously lands on the protagonist’s arm in close-up, the insect’s stinger resembling an oil drill. Lance Henriksen and Jenette Goldstein are bad-ass daddy and mommy vamps, while Bill Paxton plays one of his comically hot-headed wild cards, walking away with the film in the process. Most hauntingly, Joshua Miller plays an ancient vampire who’s stuck in the body of a young boy. Bigelow offers beautiful and terrifying images that bleed into one another with diaphanous finesse, particularly of Henriksen’s character as he’s draped over a payphone, blocking the exit of a bar that’s about to know unspeakable carnage. Denied death, the vampires are trapped, as they stand in refutation of Bigelow’s sinuous, gliding formalism, which celebrates death as release from stricture. In Point Break, Bigelow’s characters would find something in-between mortality and immortality, risking death as an intoxicating break from life, and the filmmaker’s poetry would soar to new heights. Bowen


White Dog

87. White Dog (Samuel Fuller, 1982)

Hate is a dog from hell in White Dog, Samuel Fuller’s abused and abandoned late-career masterpiece about homegrown racism. The same unsettling central concept—a hound that’s been raised to attack at the sight of black people—that had made the project a hot property in the 1970s was deemed too inflammable when Fuller filmed it in 1982. Forgetting Fuller’s previous examinations of racial turmoil (including The Steel Helmet, Run of the Arrow, and The Crimson Kimono), Paramount Pictures gave in to industry concerns and suppressed the film for nearly a decade. Accused of supplying racist ideas, White Dog is in reality the director’s most searing confrontation of the irrationality of prejudice since Hari Rhodes’s black inmate in Shock Corridor improvised a Klansman hood out of a pillow cover. As in that film, the blatant didacticism of the metaphor is transcended by Fuller’s instinctual cinematic impact, evident here as soon as a flashlight pierces through the nocturnal darkness of his opening image. Fernando F. Croce


Streetwise

86. Streetwise (Martin Bell, 1984)

Martin Bell’s Streetwise remains a boldly empathetic work of vérité portraiture. Throughout the documentary, Bell, photographer Mary Ellen Mark, and journalist Cheryl McCall follow a motley group of kids on the streets of Seattle as they panhandle, dig food out of dumpsters, and prostitute themselves to much older men. These scenes are accompanied by voiceovers from the young subjects, who describe their actions with a heartbreaking casualness that communicates two almost contradictory meanings: that they’re seasoned hustlers, having bypassed childhood for an everyday form of hell, and that they’re desperate to be seen precisely as said hustlers. To show emotion is to be vulnerable, and these subjects can’t afford to be seen as weak, yet the filmmakers capture more here than the street children may have suspected. Streetwise is charged by a deep, subterranean yearning to be loved, or even merely felt. Bowen

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Withnail & I

85. Withnail & I (Bruce Robinson, 1987)

In Bruce Robinson’s Withnail and I, two out of work thespians and flatmates in 1969, tired of London’s soot-stained, fish n’ chip paper urbanity, con a rich relative into offering the key to his cottage in Cumbria. What follows is a frenzied fog of booze-fueled betrayals and comic misunderstandings that eventually reveal to the duo the toxic nature of their dynamic. Taking cues from idol Hunter S. Thompson, whose occasional illustrator/collaborator Ralph Steadman provided Withnail and I’s promotional art, Robinson likens the demise of the Summer of Love to a bad drug trip, maintaining an achily inebriated cadence with paranoid voiceovers and a giddily episodic structure. The film’s environment doesn’t demystify the hippie myth so much as bathe it in fatigued rancor until it becomes sympathetically believable; the Hendrix tracks on the soundtrack were easy-FM picks far before 1986, and the afro-sporting black he-man that appears in the bathtub during act three seems to have wandered in from an Off Broadway production of Hair. But rather than epitomizing the countercultural lifestyle of the era in extremis as, say, Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo did, the two titular characters here patrol its antsy, mournful, disillusioned limits. Joseph Jon Lanthier


The Ballad of Narayama

84. The Ballad of Narayama (Shôhei Imamura, 1983)

Based on a story about a poor, remote village where the elderly are taken to a mountain to die to ease the burden of life on the rest of the villagers, The Ballad of Narayama is a tonally and thematically expansive one whose narrative elements (ranging from infanticide to bestiality to filial piety) are a perfect springboard for Shôhei Imamura’s high-art vulgarity. There’s a startling moment in the film where the villagers, who’ve decided to eliminate a thieving family from their hungry ranks, throw several screaming bodies into a mass grave late at night. The scene and its build-up come off with heightened intensity, the music and camera angles capturing chaos and desperation. But as the villagers fill the grave, Imamura shifts gears drastically: We notice the camera has stopped, the music has given way to the sounds of hurried labor, and in long shot the villagers wordlessly fill in the grave and scurry off to their homes. We’ve been taken out of the moment and, firmly but subtly, have been put into a position to contemplate it. Imamura’s risky balancing act between dramatic immediacy and sociological detachment is what one comes to expect in his work. Zach Campbell


The Aviator’s Wife

83. The Aviator’s Wife (Éric Rohmer, 1981)

With The Aviator’s Wife, Éric Rohmer weaves a love triangle into a detective story, exploring the ways that jealousy and passion twist and distort the way we see the world around us. Rohmer’s typically light-handed approach to a heady topic is particularly well-deployed in the film’s middle section, during which François (Philippe Marlaud) follows his girlfriend Anne’s (Marie Rivière) former lover, Christian (Mathieu Carrière), all over town to discover why he’s in town and if he can believe Anne when she says that she no longer has feelings for her ex. But as with much of Rohmer’s work, a more somber, thorny undercurrent begins to reveal itself as the film progresses. Teasing out the often paradoxical mysteries of love and the countless narratives our minds helplessly spin out of half-observed snippets of reality, The Aviator’s Wife plumbs the depths of our collective neuroses when it comes to matters of the heart, comically exposing the myriad layers of misconception that arise when our emotional armor is pierced. Smith


My Brother’s Wedding

82. My Brother’s Wedding (Charles Burnett, 1983)

The 2007 re-release of Charles Burnett’s My Brother’s Wedding, in a new director’s cut made possible by his then-increasingly public prestige, showed us how deep his humanist perspective went, yielding more evidence of the subtlety and patience with which this filmmaker explores one of the great subjects of his career: the problem of dignity among a demoralized underclass. Set in South Central Los Angeles, the film chronicles the growing pains of Pierce (Everett Silas), a young man trying to reconcile his responsibility to his family with his sense of duty to a friend who has just been released from prison. As in Killer of Sheep, the mess of life leaks in from the margins of the story, overwhelming individual characterizations. Burnett gives precedence to vignettes over the manipulations of plot, lingering on comic details such as a boy making fart noises out of boredom, or a girl who repeatedly asks Pierce to take her to the prom. My Brother’s Wedding serves as a powerful companion to its predecessor, as it evokes the comfortable familiarity its characters feel toward their milieu, as well as the sense of aimlessness that threatens to trap them there forever. Andrew Chan

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Police Story

81. Police Story (Jackie Chan, 1985)

Police Story’s climax at a shopping mall, one of the greatest action sequences in cinema, feels inevitable because it finally allows Chan Ka-Kui’s—and, by extension, Jackie Chan’s—imagination and agility to reach the full bloom of their expression. Chan opens the scene with a wide shot of the mall, a labyrinth of glass cases with escalators that reflect the building’s various surfaces, creating a hall-of-mirrors effect. This image is loaded with promise, as Chan is teasing us with the astonishing amount of variables that he’s setting up for his disposal. And he doesn’t disappoint, fashioning a symphony of tumbling bodies and shattering glass that’s beautiful, exhilarating, and weirdly poignant. Like Bruce Lee, Chan and his other brilliant stunt men move so fast that the eye can barely keep up with them, though Chan has his collaborators vary their speeds, fashioning rhythmic, syncopated escalations, with pauses that suggest the action-movie equivalent of a musical bridge, and props, with ever-shifting functions, that suggest weapons as well as dancer’s instruments. (One bit involving a coat rack is especially ingenious.) Occasional uses of slow motion suggest orgasmic eruptions of emotion, recalling the films of Sam Peckinpah. Bowen


The Fog

80. The Fog (John Carpenter, 1980)

Like most ghost stories, The Fog is obsessed by the lies of society, and shows how such illusions can be swallowed up by the sins of the past. The film was pivotal to the cementing of John Carpenter’s aesthetic. The filmmaker’s long takes and painterly compositions, which often involve only a few astutely chosen objects of focus, fuse here with his synth score to forge a cinematic grammar that expresses isolation, longing, and humbling. When Stevie (Adrienne Barbeau) descends a long staircase toward her lighthouse, Carpenter pulls the camera up to show a beautiful, terrifyingly vast landscape that dwarfs her, revealing the majesty of the primordial coast. Such an image—of a human casually, unknowingly interacting with symbolic godliness—is worthy of the compositions of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s Black Narcissus. And the vengeful phantoms are similarly reduced by their surroundings, seen mostly as shadowy wisps of a silvery fog that swallows them up with nearly the same totality as their victims. This resonant compositional relationship between figures and landscapes would be refined in films such as The Thing, Christine, and They Live, cementing Carpenter’s legend as a master of despairing left-wing pulp. Ironically, this reputation reduces the artist. He’s a master, period—a genre poet as pop existentialist. Bowen


Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

79. Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (Robert Zemeckis, 1988)

Robert Zemeckis’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit may be part cartoon, but the municipal history with which it attempts to engage has its roots very much in the real world. The basic narrative framework is a fairly transparent homage to the conspiratorial intrigue of Chinatown. The satirical dimension of this anachronistic pontificating isn’t exactly subtle, but it has a certain bite precisely because it’s true: Los Angeles did rapidly decentralize as a result of the nearly simultaneous erection of the highway and the shuttering of the Red Car, events connected by more than coincidence or circumstance. But much in the way that Chinatown offered a somewhat problematic simplification of the juicily sordid tale of the Owens Valley aqueduct, Who Framed Roger Rabbit is less interested in the objective standard of the truth than in the drama a historical basis can provide. A sense of ahistoricism is bound to pervade a movie about the foibles of a cartoon rabbit, but the government-sanctioned, corporate-controlled plot to transform the defining character of Los Angeles from an urban centrality to an unwieldy suburban sprawl resonates as all too true. Calum Marsh


The Decline of Western Civilization

78. The Decline of Western Civilization (Penelope Spheeris, 1981)

X bassist John Dow summarizes the ethos of Penelope Spheeris’s hardcore survey The Decline of Western Civilization and its two sequels when he spots a fight break out during one of the band’s performances and shouts, “Altamont, all right!” The half-joking embrace of rock’s darkest impulses of cathartic self-immolation is a defining trait of the punk and metal acts chronicled across the trilogy. If the first film’s comedy derived from its bright ruffians’ self-awareness and their ability to speak extemporaneously about their nihilistic worldviews, the first sequel is funny for its subjects’ near-total obliviousness. And if the promoters of the first film pointed the way to the capitalistic frenzy of the second, the notorious interview with a drunken Chris Holmes in a pool sets up the final installment, which checks in on a resurgent punk scene in the ’90s, only to find that the elective poverty of the first wave of hardcore rockers has now become outright homelessness and addiction. If the series title previously sounded ironic, here it fits, though the decline in question isn’t the result of the music. Rather, the music exists as the symptom of far more complex, interwoven social failures. Cole

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Polyester

77. Polyester (John Waters, 1981)

From frame one, Francine Fishpaw (Divine) is at the end of her rope, and John Waters keeps her pinned there, up against All That Heaven Allows-inspired stained-glass illumination. Whether the result of higher production values or Waters’s love for his band of misbegotten misfits, Polyester has an adorable quality no one introduced to his work vis-à-vis lip-syncing buttholes, frantic chicken-screwing, or rabies-infested princesses would ever imagine could apply to him. Not for nothing does one of his’s most beloved Dreamland players, the one-of-a-kind Edith Massey, play a debutante named Cuddles. (And Massey’s exquisite inability to deliver a convincing line reading was never put to better use than here.) Waters’s William Castle-esque gimmick of Odorama allowed audiences, using scratch ‘n’ sniff cards, to experience the film through Francine’s overdeveloped sense of smell, and when a bouquet of flowers held in front of her face is quickly replaced by a pair of fungus-ridden gym shoes, the flatulent bad taste couldn’t be further removed from Pink Flamingos’s Babs Johnson fellating her son, Crackers. Compared to Waters’s earlier films, all of which could be argued to exist within a perverted fantasy land, Polyester probably cuts closer to the tacky reality of his own upbringing than ever before, sending up the less overt farcicalities of middle-class American existence, depicted as non-aspirational and culturally incurious by default. Eric Henderson


Die Hard

76. Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988)

Perhaps the film that’s most responsible for consolidating ’80s action-movie tropes in the cultural imagination, John McTiernan’s Die Hard came to define both the genre and the decade while also slyly subverting their ideology. The memorable script revels in its own clichés, as Alan Rickman’s sophisticated terrorist Hans Gruber goes blow for blow with Bruce Willis’s off-duty cop John McClane, matching his all-American wisecracks with a more European, world-weary contempt. Throwing out disparaging references to Dirty Harry and Rambo in an early precursor of the postmodern irony that would come to define ’90s Hollywood, Gruber also reflects the Reagan-era victory of global capital, posing as the political radical he once was just so he can steal bearer bonds from a Japanese corporation. And the film’s skyscraper setting turns the period’s imposing architecture into an elaborate sandbox, where all kinds of spectacular assaults and escapes are shot with an exhilarating efficiency. Willis convincingly portrays a regular guy who’s just trying to make the best of an increasingly bad situation, and Die Hard succeeds where its slew of imitators fail because of how well it balances the understated romance at its core with a knowing cynicism. David Robb


Evil Dead 2

75. Evil Dead 2 (Sam Raimi, 1987)

Where the original Evil Dead was a juggling act of film-school antics and genuinely evocative creepiness, Sam Raimi’s sequel/remake is full-on gore slapstick, more Tex Avery than Dario Argento. All of the first film is wittily telescoped into the opening five minutes of Evil Dead 2, recapping how Ash’s (Bruce Campbell) weekend getaway in the woods got interrupted by evil forces unleashed by the Book of the Dead, right down to the ominous final tracking shot straight into a screaming mouth. Daybreak gives the hapless hero some much-needed time-out, but, since the film is shaped as a wide-eyed comedy of bravura kineticism, it doesn’t take long for the frenetic splatter gags to kick off again. Indeed, for the most part, Evil Dead 2 places Ash as straight man to Raimi’s delirious camerawork, with no prankish stone left unturned: winking setups, rotating sets, disorientating lens tricks, forced perspectives, and blood geysers erupting from shotgun blasts. Raimi’s resourceful restlessness ultimately pushes the film beyond gooey genre pastiche and into uniquely absurd farce. Ash may lose limbs as he chainsaws his way through the installment, but Evil Dead 2 holds together as the giddiest treatment of viscera this side of Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive. Croce


Akira

74. Akira (Katsuhiro Otomo, 1988)

Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira, based on his own 1982 manga, updates the lingering Japanese anxiety about nuclear annihilation for the cybernetic era, as the superweapons in 2019 Neo-Tokyo turn out to be gifted children whose telekinetic powers have been enhanced by a secret government program, rather than nuclear warheads. The images of mass destruction that bookend this stylish but haunting animated action film speak to a fear not only of a social apocalypse, but a human one. The transformation of the “esper” Tetsuo (Nozumu Sasaki) into a transcendent consciousness comes with a painful and gruesome transmogrification of his body into a fleshy, unruly monstrosity; Otomo infuses the sci-fi trope of the rebirth of the human, optimistically presented even in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, with Lovecraftian horror. Between the film’s two apocalypses is an adventure that plays out in the intricately detailed world of Neo-Tokyo, perhaps the most iconic of all cyberpunk cityscapes. As Tetsuo’s motorcycle gang races through the sinews of Neo-Tokyo’s complex of highways, past its flickering screens and neon lights, we get the impression of a world—not too far removed from the real 2019—in which the proliferation of technological networks has paradoxically led to social atomization, inequity, and aimless discontent. Brown

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A City of Sadness

73. A City of Sadness (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1989)

The Taiwanese New Wave of the 1980s yielded an embarrassment of riches, and A City of Sadness was one of its crown jewels. A major artistic leap forward in the work of director Hou Hsiao-hsien, the film charts four years in the history of Taiwan, from the Japanese relinquishment of control to mainland China in 1945 to Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist takeover in 1949. Throughout, events are filtered through the personal and political conflicts of the Lin family, with Hou patiently observing its members across a complex and elliptical series of vignettes, which range from domestic rituals to violent physical confrontations. But in spite of its epic sweep, A City of Sadness never feels like a history lesson. By focusing on the human component of a crucial period in Taiwanese history, Hou profoundly reveals a group’s quiet struggle with the feeling of having no identity as a result of their island state being in a perpetual state of limbo. Wes Greene


Day of the Dead

72. Day of the Dead (George A. Romero, 1985)

Watching Day of the Dead with visions of sugary Dawn of the Dead tableaus dancing in your head, you may be struck with the almost angry deconstruction of the zombie legend that George A. Romero unleashes with this savage finale to his original trilogy of films. (With this entry, Romero all but laid the repulsive framework for a nearly forgotten ’80s splatterpunk movement, an explosive collision of gore and apocalypse subgenres.) Though still unmistakably allegorical, much of the irony and parable foreshadowing of the first two films has all but vanished, leaving behind bitterness, lament and cynicism. In a world that seems to drift further and further into a diplomatic declaration of martial law with each and every presidential address, the overriding voice of Day of the Dead speaks for the universal rage of all displaced peoples, backed into a corner and certain that they are in the oppressed minority. It is the synthesis of all the racial, tribal, social and governmental concerns of the first two films, and Romero’s notions are not pretty. Henderson


The Last Temptation of Christ

71. The Last Temptation of Christ (Martin Scorsese, 1988)

It isn’t hard to discern the attraction Nikos Kazantzakis’s 1953 novel The Last Temptation of Christ must have held for Martin Scorsese. Kazantzakis presents his Jesus (in keeping with the most orthodox of theologies) as fully human—prey to doubt, racked with guilt, and tormented by conflicting inner voices. The focus of much of the furor that surrounded the film when it came out stems from the final act: an extended excursus that lets Jesus (Willem Dafoe) off the hook—or nail, as the case may be—as a would-be messiah, weds him to Mary Magdalene (Barbara Hershey), and, after her death, finds him an aging patriarch engaged in a ménage-a-trois with Martha (Peggy Gormley) and Mary (Randy Danson), the sisters of Lazarus. Of course, this is only the last of Jesus’s satanic temptations, as promised by the film’s very title: To remain merely human, to pass along the cup of suffering, to attain the height of domestic content, turns out to be the apple of knowledge proffered by an angelic-seeming little girl (Juliette Caton). Not until he’s on his deathbed, Jerusalem burning in the distance, does Jesus realize his error, prompted by an indignant Judas (Harvey Keitel). Crawling abjectly back up Golgotha, Jesus assumes his rightful place with a conclusive “It is accomplished.” Only the most blinkered and sclerotic dogmatist could find basis for outrage in what is, all told, a deeply felt attempt to imaginatively portray the all-too-human clashes in the soul of their religion’s redeemer. Budd Wilkins


Full Metal Jacket

70. Full Metal Jacket (Stanley Kubrick, 1987)

A film of unrestrained vitriol and aggression, Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket states its primary concern fairly loud, when Private Joker (Matthew Modine) is grilled for wearing a peace pin on his combat uniform while having “Born to Kill” scrawled across his helmet. He responds that it’s a comment on the duality of man, warring and peaceable—or, in this case, the Marine-brand, courageous, thoughtless, instinctual killer, the human beneath it, and the difficulties if not the futility of one suppressing the other. Kubrick’s particularly effective stroke was to purposefully ignore the politics of Vietnam and keep both sides of this generalized central conflict right in your face. The photography puts us over the shoulders of fighting soldiers, as well as in the immediate line of fire. In the safety of an American training depot, the personal danger is ever-present and relentless as the recruits are “born again hard.” The two characters who best fit that catchy phrase are, not coincidentally, also the two genuinely insane and deadly ones—and they’re both American: Pyle and the helicopter gunner who fires at any Vietnamese person standing beneath his chopper. Kubrick works expressly on this level of the individual and unspecialized grunt to create a film that is less a defense or criticism of war than a strike at the mythologies of war-making. In its constant and irreversible violence, Full Metal Jacket, one of Kubrick’s grittiest works, is also one of his most resonant. Arthur Ryel-Lindsey

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Empire of the Sun

69. Empire of the Sun (Steven Spielberg, 1987)

Empire of the Sun, based on the 1984 autobiographical novel by J.G. Ballard, is pure Spielberg and a perfect match of director and material, focusing as it does on a child separated from his family, whose suburban existence is turned upside down by a mysterious outside force. But unlike prior Spielberg films, this is less a celebration of the wonders of childhood and more a lament for the loss of a child’s innocence. Jim (Christian Bale) is a boy who doesn’t want to grow up, because to do so would mean having to acknowledge the terrible things that have happened to him, as well as forcing him to consider the childhood that he has lost. While Jim may be a surrogate for Ballard, he’s also a substitute for Spielberg. Both Jim and Spielberg (at the time of this film) can be seen as talented and privileged young men (combining childhood naïveté and adult savvy) who have found themselves in the big bad world of adults, and who have coped by retreating into their vivid imaginations and created idealized versions of their childhood experiences. But by the end of the film, Jim’s blinders are torn away, and he will never be the same again. Ultimately, Empire of the Sun is one of the bleakest films that Spielberg has made about childhood (or more accurately, the transition from being a carefree child to a responsible adult), and as such is a key film in the growth and development of his career. Martyn Bamber


Pauline at the Beach

68. Pauline at the Beach (Éric Rohmer, 1983)

Like most of Eric Rohmer’s work, Pauline at the Beach revolves around people in love, or at least people trying to work out what they even understand love to be. However, teenage Pauline (Amanda Langlet) represents a rare change of pace for a Rohmer protagonist. Though she doesn’t know yet what she wants from a relationship, Pauline comes off by far the most mature, level-headed person on the subject compared to her older cousin, Marion (Arielle Dombasle), and the men who orbit both their lives. Compared to the other films in the Comedies and Proverbs series, which adopted more handheld, quickly shot methods to reflect the jittery, confused adolescence of their characters, Pauline at the Beach recalls the unobtrusive formalism of Rohmer’s early work. Cinematographer Néstor Almendros evocatively captures the pale sunlight of the Brittany coast, using its harsh glints to match Pauline’s penetrating study of her peers, while the mostly static camera speaks to her grounded feelings. The film ends with a mutual state of denial shared by the two cousins, though one gets the sense that Pauline agrees to Marion’s willful ignorance simply for her sake, as she can already reconcile the contradictions and disappointments of romance without issue. Cole


Tenebre

67. Tenebre (Dario Argento, 1982)

Tenebre’s success depends on your appreciation for its rigid self-reflexivity. During the film’s opening sequence, the killer’s gloved hands hold a book (titled Tenebrae, a variation of the film’s title) up to a flame, and a faceless narrator reads a passage that serves as disclaimer of sorts, as well as offers many important hints of things to come. And while these words represent many things, mainly they serve as an unbridled apology for both the actions of the film’s murderers and for Argento’s very own cinema of horror. It’s as if Argento is saying that he can’t help himself. A vicious riposte to Roland Barthes’s “The Death of the Author,” this gruesome giallo shocker decisively fuses artistic intentions and hazy personal experience with furious outcomes. The result is a CliffsNotes for perversion. The intersection of art and violence has rarely been as brutal (deaths are usually intertwined with architecture, and one victim’s blood fans across a white wall like a grisly Jackson Pollock), and Argento’s self-implication has rarely yielded something that argues so strenuously against interpretation. Understandably, given the body count. Edna Henderson


The Terminator

66. The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984)

James Cameron’s influences include all manner of science fiction, from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey to Ray Bradbury to George Lucas’s Star Wars, but the film’s true creative counterpart might be Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Religious, if not outright spiritual, The Terminator is, at its core, a meditation on mankind’s thirst for progress and the likely fallout that results from a lack of self-regulation, extinction being the ultimate punishment for the sin of creation without moral consideration. As in its thematic successor, The Matrix, the man-versus-machine dynamic might be too outwardly dramatic to be truly prescient (in reality, we’ll probably get something closer to a WALL-E/Road Warrior dystopia when the shit hits the fan), but the film’s pulp trappings—or rather, here, tech noir—reach a modestly operatic intensity that more than justifies the metaphorical frankness of the proceedings. The film’s understated, workmanlike artistry suggests both the quotidian and the extraordinary, particularly when paired with the robotic emotion of Brad Fiedel’s synth score. It erupts in your consciousness and takes flight like a dream. Humanick

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Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior

65. The Road Warrior (George Miller, 1981)

The Road Warrior is a poetic action sonata of cars and leather that’s rich in beautifully composed wide shots that are designed to tickle the eye, climaxing with an awesomely inventive act of demolition-derby warfare. The last third of the film’s running time consists of a series of interlocking action stanzas that cumulatively yield one massive, astonishingly coherent set piece, yet it’s the little ceremonial details one remembers most. Particularly the prolonged shot of a leather-clad psychopath screaming as he pulls an arrow out of his arm, staring at Max (Mel Gibson) as he does so, while Brian May’s operatic metal score intensifies the mood of sadomasochistic nihilism. George Miller’s a stickler for detail and tactility; he drinks in his apocalyptic vehicles before they jump into action, charging up and circling one another, as the filmmaker understands that a fight of any sort must be reveled in, built up, transformed into theater. Breathtaking landscape shots are populated with gonzo warriors who steer their prehistoric insect-like vehicles into elaborate parades and promenades that include the flipping of switches, the clinking and clanking of chains and firearms, the beating of drums, and the elaborate assemblage of ludicrously amazing war-crafts. Bowen


Wings of Desire

64. Wings of Desire (Wim Wenders, 1988)

The grand theme of Wings of Desire, Wim Wenders’s fantasy of overcoat-clad angels in Berlin as the Cold War’s end drew near, is storytelling in all its forms as a coping mechanism of the human race. Kindly Damiel (Bruno Ganz) and his more objective but similarly empathetic cohort, Cassiel (Otto Sander), whose wings are only fleetingly glimpsed throughout the film, swap tales of the small behaviors and interactions they’ve witnessed after traversing the skies and streets to hear “only what is spiritual in people’s minds.” Cinematographer Henri Alekan’s mostly monochrome images match the beauty of their grays and blacks with the mood of a city’s historical weight, and the music ranges from classical evocation of the past in Jürgen Knieper’s score, heavy with strings and choral parts, to the theatrical aggression of Australian postpunk. Wenders’s elevation of the everyday—whether it’s a tour-de-force spatial fugue through a modernist public library, Peter Falk’s ode to the joy of coffee and cigarettes, or the riotously ghastly jacket a metamorphosed angel buys in a pawnshop—makes the heavenly agents’ obsession with the material and finite an unquestionable attraction. So long a presence in the area that he can recall the emergence of the first Berliner from its primeval savannah, Damiel decisively gripes to Cassiel, “Enough of the world behind the world!” Bill Weber


Crimes of Passion

63. Crimes of Passion (Ken Russell, 1984)

Loosely centered on Joanna Crane (Kathleen Turner), a fashion designer who moonlights as prostitute China Blue, Ken Russell’s seedy neo-noir Crimes of Passion uses her double life to explore a decade torn between self-indulgence and self-denial. Joanna’s clientèle uses her to live out fantasies they could never admit to wanting to fulfill outside of the professional context of sex work, and no john is crazier than Peter Shayne (Anthony Perkins), a reverend who snorts amyl nitrate and carries around a bladed sex toy he intends to use to satisfy both his desires and his religious abhorrence of his lust. But if Shayne’s exaggerated self-loathing epitomizes the extremity of Crimes of Passion’s overall style, the film nonetheless explores subtler, more realistic forms of skewed sexual understanding. Joanna does find salvation, of a kind, with Bobby (John Laughlin),, who shakes her out of her blasé, self-defensive attitude toward romance just as she offers him a physical and emotional connection he’s lost with his wife. Yet while the film dabbles in the “hooker with a heart of gold” cliché, it does not pity Joanna for her work. Instead, she and Bobby reach equilibrium in their sexuality, each balancing the other’s extremities. It’s a simple thesis, but Russell’s wild style and shameless exhibitionism places it on a par with the contemporary work of Brian De Palma in terms of its vicious satire of ’80s kitsch and repression. Cole


Stranger Than Paradise

62. Stranger Than Paradise (Jim Jarmusch, 1984)

Jim Jarmusch’s sophomore feature, Stranger Than Paradise, established him as the No Wave scene’s breakout filmmaker. Like Glenn Branca did for music, Jarmusch successfully wrenched the stripped-down style that the movement was known for into something more refined. The filmmaker transposes the alienation inherent to No Wave’s scuzzy view of American society in general and New York City in particular into a more literal fish-out-of-water story by centering the perspective of a foreigner wandering through the city before sinking deeper into the country. When Eva (Eszter Balint) arrives in America from her native Hungary, we see her walking past faded façades of storefronts that show New York at its most anonymous. Adding to the sense of displacement is a scrawl of graffiti in the background that reads “U.S. out of everywhere! Go home!”—a bit of deadpan irony that defines the tone of the film, and indeed Jarmusch’s filmography at large. “You know, it’s funny,” Eddie (Richard Edson) says at one point as he and Willie (John Lurie) stand in among a bare patch of land in the middle of Cleveland. “You come to someplace new, and everything looks just the same.” In that sentiment is the crux of Jarmusch’s oeuvre, a collection of images off the beaten path, of the mundanity not typically filmed that links the nation’s metropoles, hamlets, and countrysides in a sense of shared alienation. Cole

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Matador

61. Matador (Pedro Almodóvar, 1986)

Hand on cock, eyes on Mario Bava—no Pedro Almodóvar film opens as perversely, and so thoroughly forgoes middlebrow accessibility, as Matador. Almodóvar stages Diego (Nacho Martínez) stretching from a chair, his heels propped atop a TV set, and jerking off to the goriest scenes from Blood and Black Lace, like it’s a routine evening at home watching his favorite sitcom. A tale of bullfighting and romance only in passing, little holds water (but plenty spills blood) in Almodóvar’s greatest ’80s film. It’s an apogee of queer psychosexual scenarios that plays out like a gialli, in part, but is unmistakably an inaugural culmination of the director’s virulent skewering of bourgeois aesthetics—including diligent homage. Some have asked if Bava would have condoned such an appropriation of his own film. Almodóvar’s razor-edged brio suggests he couldn’t care less. Dillard


El Sur

60. El Sur (Víctor Erice, 1983)

The title of Victor Erice’s El Sur refers to the south of Spain but also slyly alludes to the fractured state of the country in the wake of the Spanish Civil War. As in The Spirit of the Beehive, Erice also filters the underlying fears and anxieties of those who lived through Francisco Franco’s reign through the eyes of a child. Eight-year-old Estrella (Sonsoles Aranguren) struggles to understand or bond with her profoundly sad, mysterious father, Agustín (Omero Antonutti), who himself had a terrible falling out with his Franco-supporting father decades earlier. Appearing to possess some sort of mystical power, Agustín serves as both the metaphorical embodiment of the lingering wounds of the post-Civil War years as well as an impenetrable mystery whom Estrella desperately seeks to solve. Erice planned to further explore the story of Agustín’s earlier life and the root of his powers more explicitly in the second 90 minutes of a three-hour film, but when funding was cut, El Sur was left to end just as the mystery was unraveling. Yet, rather than feeling incomplete, El Sur is fittingly elusive and melancholy in its poetic expression of generational disconnect, with Agustín and his past left tragically as an enigma to both his daughter and the audience—a casualty of war never to be excavated. Smith


The Vanishing

59. The Vanishing (George Sluizer, 1988)

Horror films typically isolate and dramatize that moment when the taken-for-granted stability of “civilized” society crumbles into chaos. The challenge in conveying a sensation of real violation in a horror film resides in the fact that audiences flock to the genre specifically to feel it, which is to say that instability ironically represents stability in this context, as you’re getting what you pay for in a brokered, preordained fashion. The most shocking thing a horror film could really do, then, would be to simply have nothing happen—and this is the key to The Vanishing’s weird, fairy-tale power. Director George Sluizer devises a mystery that very purposefully collapses in on itself, as the terror of The Vanishing resides in its ultimate revelation that there isn’t any mystery at all, a development that carries obviously existential notes of despair. There’s no guiding motivation behind the disappearance that drives the film, and no cathartic purging of guilt or triumph of good; there isn’t even really a triumph of evil. A few things randomly happen, then a few more things, then nothing. The end. That non-ending, though, is one of the greatest in all of cinema and the source of many a nightmare. Bowen


Koyaanisqatsi

58. Koyaanisqatsi (Godfrey Reggio, 1982)

The Qatsi Trilogy is a bracing reminder that cinema is a medium with possibilities considerably broader than telling a conventional three-act story predominantly characterized by images of people talking. All three films in the trilogy convey powerful, nearly primordial emotions that are unencumbered by linearity, which in turn inspires awe as well as regret that most films reveling in an intuitive trust of image are withheld from the majority of the public by unimaginative studio marketing. Which is somewhat ironic considering that marketing of a different sort has benefited from The Qatsi Trilogy, particularly Koyaanisqatsi. The film is a despairing, apocalyptic montage of images, wedded to Philip Glass’s incomparable score, that concern what would become the trilogy’s unifying theme of technology as humankind’s master rather than its servant. Removing what he refers to as “the foreground” of cinema (plot, characters, dialogue), Godfrey Reggio focuses exclusively on the background (the buildings, the landscapes, the traffic, the factory assembly lines, as well as the assembled lines and crowds of human beings) in an effort to paint said background, taken for granted by most, as a living entity that, in Reggio’s words, “we have no language to describe.” In capturing this entity, Reggio strikingly uses slow motion and time-lapse photography, among other techniques, which advertisers in the Reagan years were quick to cannibalize in an effort to peddle more cars. Bowen

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The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover

57. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (Peter Greenaway, 1989)

Throughout The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, Peter Greenaway goes to further moment-to-moment extremes of planimetric staging and obsessive symmetry than Stanley Kubrick ever did. In the first of many inspired meshings of the virtuosic and the grotesque, he opens the film with the camera ascending from a basement full of snarling canines to a foggy parking lot high above, to watch as the foul-mouthed Albert (Michael Gambon) trains the full force of his goon squad on an unlucky patron of his upscale restaurant. In rigorously choreographed dolly movements, Greenaway probes the increasingly unflattering layers of the restaurant over the course of a few eventful evenings, charting Albert’s gradual implosion as he gathers details about his wife’s (Helen Mirren) scandalous infidelity and proceeds to wreak havoc on his customers and kitchen appliances. This visually resplendent work has often been interpreted as an allegory for Thatcher’s iron-fisted England and its intimidating restrictions on free will, a literal reading that helps to lend symbolic significance to the actions of the film’s major players. But such a one-to-one political analysis undersells Greenaway’s magnificently appalling vision of power-mad cruelty, which tackles human nature in its totality, reconfigured as an avant-garde ballet of camera, performers, light, costumes, and objects. Lund


Grave of the Fireflies

56. Grave of the Fireflies (Isao Takahata, 1988)

Isao Takahata’s wrenching yet largely unsentimental anime depicts the “collateral damage” of the United States’s firebombing of Japan in the waning years of World War II, but its ultimate aim is a universal understanding of the toll of warfare. Co-founder of Studio Ghibli with Hayao Miyazaki, Takahata is chiefly a neorealist, a conjurer of unfettered human experience working in a medium (and studio) known for its allegiance to fantasy and otherworldliness. Indeed, the story of Grave of the Fireflies could have easily enticed Kon Ichikawa with its sensitive, moral, and honest detailing of life during wartime, seen through the narrative lens of a brother and sister (voiced by Tsutomu Tatsumi and Ayano Shiraishi, respectively) who are orphaned by firebombing and find unstable shelter with their aunt at a nearby village. The film’s title comes from a scene late in the film that speaks directly to the human indifference that Takahata is obviously raging against. After the siblings’ first night in the cave, they find that the fireflies they caught have died and Setsuko buries them in a tiny hole. At that moment, Takahata cuts back to the mass grave that Setsuko and Seita’s mother was tossed in after the firebombing. The long tragedy of war, its endless horror and degradation, isn’t reserved solely for those who march bravely across enemy lines. Chris Cabin


Raiders of the Lost Ark

55. Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg, 1981)

Raiders of the Lost Ark holds up for many reasons, not least of which is because of Steven Spielberg’s consummate skill as a visual storyteller and his ability to draw charged performances from his actors. Each standalone set piece is virtuoso in its pacing, timing of jokes, and emotional payoff. For an action-adventure film, Raiders of the Lost Ark is about spectatorship, and our hero, Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford), transforms into a stand-in for the audience. When the ark is opened, it’s as a Steven Spielberg-George Lucas laser light show of lightning, smoke, and holy fire, as well as a chamber of horrors where skull-faced ghosts swirl through the air and the faces of the various bad guys start melting into crimson jelly. It’s unnerving and spooky, and a fitting conclusion to this strange, surprisingly dark bit of pulp filmmaking. This is the A version of a B movie, but it assumes that the kids in the audience will be able to take whatever the filmmakers throw at them. It’s reminiscent of serials and cartoon strips from the World War II era, which also assumed that the audience was tough enough to handle muscular action and bizarre terror on screen. Raiders of the Lost Ark is a throwback to that kind of storytelling, and also a reminder that in 1981 movies for children were less soft and didn’t bother coddling. You were expected to cover your eyes. Jeremiah Kipp


Brazil

54. Brazil (Terry Gilliam, 1985)

Through its wildly comic, furiously creative, and intensely moving façade, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil ponders a future made to sustain a draconian past molded by inequality. Overrun by communicative ducts, coated wires, cement and metals, and magnified, miniature computer screens, the future conjured up by Gilliam averts the familiar prophecy of an anaesthetized, plastic world overrun by rampantly advancing technology. Besides the obvious Orwellian elements, the filmic pedigree of Brazil is richly layered, potently evoking The Third Man, the Marx brothers, Battleship Potemkin, Star Wars, Kurosawa, Casablanca, 8 ½, Modern Times, and, most vibrantly, Metropolis, among others. Such tremendous artists and films depicted both the harshness and necessity of reality, as well as the enveloping power and ultimate intangibility of imagination and expression, and Brazil is a glorious ode to that essential dichotomy. Gilliam presents an utterly singular vision of a world where the cold, exacting actions of an all-powerful plutocracy are at once fighting against and employing fantasy, where the individual can be eaten alive and erased by pieces of paper. Cabin

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Blood Simple

53. Blood Simple (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1984)

If Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil is generally understood to be the end of Hollywood’s initial noir cycle, then Blood Simple, financed and produced independently, announces a resurrection of the style under a different order of operations, one linking the production methods of the ’80s slasher cycle and other low-budget horror films to the possibility of a neo-noir cycle that could manifest through similar means. James Naremore says Blood Simple contains “hyper-Wellesian tracking shots,” but the movements seem more approximate to the Steadicam as used by John Carpenter, so that whenever characters move through space, the camera emphasizes the space’s enclosure, not its widening. Moreover, Ray (John Getz) and Abby’s (Frances McDormand) chat inside a car seems plucked straight from Halloween’s post-prologue scene, with the rainy night creating a chiaroscuro effect of blacks and blues. If Blood Simple is understood to be in dialogue with its horror contemporaries, analysis can shift from noir’s focus on psychological and existential fears to both that of the body in trauma and the body of genre cinema itself as a meaningful form for contemporary thought. Lest the Coens be lumped in with the pastiche hacks of the world, Blood Simple comprehensively thematizes miscommunication, rendering nearly every scene a meditation on some form of mixed signals. Dillard


Down by Law

52. Down by Law (Jim Jarmusch, 1986)

Divorcing New Orleans from its stereotypes (there’s no ham-fisted Creole dialogue, no digs at the indigenous cuisine), Jim Jarmusch’s Down by Law imagines the boiling, boggy city as a purgatory for lost souls, spotted with cinephiliac mold. (The prologue recalls the uneasy relationships in Sam Fuller’s movies; the third act is lifted from Grand Illusion.) The crescent city has been gutted almost entirely of people, and of anything in which those people might take pride; the wet, crumbling streets are virtually empty, aside from the few characters we get to know. These individuals—the pimp, Jack (John Lurie), and the DJ, Zack (Tom Waits)—are also outsiders who’ve burned professional and personal bridges behind them. Their women, smeared with moist light, try to teach them the facts of life (“All you got to do is learn to jerk people off a little!”), but these homilies are rejected. Southern Louisiana, though photographed with such dry, brittle focus, has become their humid prison. The thin plot is fetid with familiarity, yet hard to align with direct antecedents; it’s more haunted by them than influenced. Throughout, Jarmusch and his characters are equally determined to either wrench the world to meet their needs and ideals, or retreat into fantasy. Lanthier


After Hours

51. After Hours (Martin Scorsese, 1985)

SoHo is mere blocks from where Martin Scorsese spent his childhood, and with After Hours, the filmmaker presents a vision of the neighborhood governed by a child’s sense of curiosity and apprehension about what lies beyond the confines of the familiar. Clocking in at a brisk 97 minutes, the film compresses one disastrous evening in the life of Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne), a neurotic nine-to-fiver with an everyman’s yearning for something greater than his humdrum lot but barely any gumption to do much about it. When he meets the charming and spontaneous Marcy (Rosanna Arquette) at a diner after work, things momentarily look hopeful, though an invitation to her apartment later that night sets in motion an extraordinary string of misadventures perpetuated by both dumb luck and bad decisions. Made as a lark when funding was suddenly pulled for The Last Temptation of Christ, After Hours finds Scorsese at his most stylistically invigorated, working for the first time with Michael Ballhaus, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s longtime cinematographer, to concoct a rain-slicked Soho distorted by Paul’s paranoid point of view. That the copious tricked-out camera movements and departures from aesthetic and narrative logic never feel gratuitous speaks to Scorsese’s innate feel for the desperate mind of his protagonist, as well as for the bent logic of New York nightlife. Lund


Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story

50. Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (Todd Haynes, 1988)

Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story is semiotics camp with a ’70s soundtrack. Sounds like a blast and a half right? You want to program that right up against Xanadu and The Wiz, don’t you? Most of the writing surrounding Todd Haynes’s widely bootlegged 1987 stunner make it sound precious, impenetrable, and maybe even a bit obvious: the Karen Carpenter tragedy as reenacted by Barbie dolls, frequently interrupted with segments mimicking educational one-reels of the polyester years, and all juxtaposed against clips from the Holocaust and The Poseidon Adventure. Richard Carpenter’s objections (and slam-dunk litigation against Haynes’s unauthorized use of his music) sealed Superstar’s notoriety, and it persists as a gay cult classic for, among other reasons, fighting against pop culture’s narrow definitions of art, entertainment, existence. Henderson

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Dressed to Kill

49. Dressed to Kill (Brian De Palma, 1980)

Dressed to Kill certainly belongs in the rich company of Noo Yawk, Rotten Apple, post-disco, post-feminist, post-Stonewall, post-Son of Sam, pre-AIDS urban nightmare movies that seemed to emerge from faded balconies of the slightly more upscale grindhouse venues on 42nd. But its funk of hedonism is only as pungent as a perfume sample in a department store catalogue ad, unlike the thick grime of its shrieking cinematic sisters Ms. 45, Maniac, and Cruising. No, what we have here is the work of a director who saw the charred aftermath of the sexual revolution’s late-’70s bust and thought, “I should cast my wife as a hooker again. A real Park Avenue whore.” Who, instead of taking a gritty, hard-on look at the twisted bi-curious ground shared by Ms. 45, All That jazz, and The Warriors, inflates paperback pulp psychology into something like a plot, all the better to demonstrate that filmmaking is an inherently visual storytelling. Who’s justifiably confident enough in his craft that he can limit himself to two schools of dialogue: soap-opera exposition and silence. Who, to paraphrase Pauline Kael, could turn a seamy museum pick-up into an accelerated, 10-minute Dangerous Liaisons. It’s the most perfectly directed film ever, provided you, like me, bust into orgasmic laughter when De Palma’s double-shuffling editing makes it seem like the only threat Nancy Allen and a wooden cop can see boarding the subway is a 250-pound bag lady. Henderson


Taipei Story

48. Taipei Story (Edward Yang, 1985)

Edward Yang’s Taipei Story performs an autopsy on a handful of relationships, all of them unfolding against a neo-lit Taipei, which seems by turns inviting and ruinous. Yang’s film helped inaugurate what author James Tweedie calls “the staging of globalization” in Chinese cinema, in which characters and cities are depicted as simultaneously grappling with their shifting identities, and the film remains one of the trend’s most striking iterations. After Lung (Hou Hsiao-hsien, who co-wrote the film with Yang) returns from a trip to Los Angeles, he explains it’s “just like Taipei,” and spends much of the film’s remainder contemplating a move to the States with Chin (Tsai Chin), a woman who’s lost the ability to articulate her feelings of discontent. As a character bleeds out in a Taipei gutter near the film’s conclusion, an American corporation is setting up shop just a few blocks away, thus completing the other half of the tautology: Taipei is just like L.A. Dillard


Thief

47. Thief (Michael Mann, 1981)

As if planned backward from its Pyrrhic-tragic conclusion, Thief is never spoiled by any seeming inevitability, confident as we may be that sweet, good things can’t last. The juice, to appropriate a Mann Mann-sourced phrase, isn’t in the action, but in the inaction, in the conversations between principals. You can tick off a half-dozen or more great scenes in Thief before you name one involving a gun; well staged though the scene may be, it’s easy to forget that Urizzi (John Santucci) pinches Frank (James Caan) at the end of a shotgun, but his lines in the interrogation room and his dirty, contemptuous looks resonate beyond the enclosures of scenes and frames. Not overtly recalling Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket, the misfit loner acquires things of no spiritual value in a useless attempt to achieve a personal state of grace. Going by the blueprint of brooding, sentimental tragedy, there’s no place for the crook in an equally crooked world; even though everyone’s on the take, Frank is correctly identified as dangerous because he “doesn’t give a fuck.” His feet to the fire in two major scenes (cops in one, criminals in the other), Frank’s field of vision narrows to the width of a single atom, excluding such distractions as family, his two legit businesses, his underworld connections—everything, finally, but the jacket on his back, 10 fingers and 10 toes, and his piece, still warm from a kill. Christley


Chocolat

46. Chocolat (Claire Denis, 1988)

Drawing from Claire Denis’s personal history as the daughter of a French bureaucrat stationed in Africa, Chocolat tells its story of sexual tension between a white woman (Giulia Boschi) and her black servant, Protée (Isaach de Bankolé), in flashback, from the point of view of the woman’s daughter, the too-aptly named France (Mireille Perrier as an adult, Cécile Ducasse as a child). The film’s perspective alternates between France’s innocent childhood love for Protée and her grown-up recognition of the pain the man must have felt at being infantilized by her family—as suggested by scenes that depart from the girl’s perspective and linger on Protée’s subdued anguish. Denis’s portrayal of race relations in 1950s French Cameroon is unsparing, even as its commentary goes largely unspoken; the film features neither grandiloquent speeches nor final reconciliations. Returning to its present timeline, Chocolat shows us black airline workers loading the plane on which the adult France is returning to Europe after a nostalgic visit back to Cameroon—an elliptical conclusion that leaves us questioning the persistence of colonial race relations in the modern world. Brown

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Ms. 45

45. Ms. 45 (Abel Ferrara, 1981)

Ms. 45 stands as the best of the “golden age” of that sordid subgenre known as the “rape and revenge” film. On its face, such a distinction is dubious at best, but Abel Ferrara’s sophomore feature epitomizes the first stage of his filmmaking career (or second, if you count his short stint in softcore). Rape and revenge movies are inherently muddled in their ideology, eroticizing every assault while pretending that the subsequent bloodletting stands as an unambiguously pro-woman stance. But Ms. 45 expressly foregrounds its thematic confusion; it’s not a movie about justified comeuppance, but the mental collapse of a deeply traumatized individual, whose actions are merely a perpetuation of senseless violence. Whether done to keep costs down or out of conscious awareness of its implications, Ferrara’s decision to cast himself as the first rapist acts as a skeleton key for an entire career predicated on the unavoidable exploitation of filmmaking. As his character leaves Thana (Zoë Lund, a key source of the film’s visceral intensity) in a pile of garbage, he hisses, “I’ll see you later, baby,” and as every man but him meets a grim fate, the clear inference is that he’s escaped to behind the camera. That adds even more charge to those frantic close-ups of Thana’s tensing face, and the shots of her pointing her Colt just off screen suggest that she can sense the one that got away. Cole


Sherman’s March

44. Sherman’s March (Ross McElwee, 1985)

The Mark Twain of documentary filmmaking, Ross McElwee is a purveyor of American dreams whose wit is surpassed only by his uncanny knack for observation. For his first feature-length work, he wanted to focus on General William Tecumseh Sherman’s bloody march through the South during the height of the Civil War and explore the cultural implications of that march on the people that currently live below and around the Mason Dixon. Sherman’s March is very much that film, but it’s also about McElwee’s search for romantic and sexual fulfillment. Throughout, McElwee meets and reconnects with a series of female friends and potential flames, from a struggling actress hell-bent on starring in a Burt Reynolds film to a woman who seems to live by the mantra Thoreau laid out in Walden. Every story that reaches McElwee’s ears, however directly or indirectly (female inmates escaping a mental institution; the would-be actress’s Tarzan-meets-Venus script idea), becomes part of a dream-like cultural tapestry sewed together from the ravages of Sherman’s journey. When the erudite Winnie casually asks Ross whether he thinks Sherman’s march to the sea was an attempt to show that he wasn’t a failure, you realize for the first time that McElwee is a stand-in for the general. The only difference is that the filmmaker doesn’t leave thousands dead in his wake, merely broken hearts and missed opportunities. Gonzalez


Stop Making Sense

43. Stop Making Sense (Jonathan Demme, 1984)

Stop Making Sense doesn’t feel self-conscious and “good for you,” though it is good for you. You feel Talking Heads frontman David Bryne’s pop bliss. Bryne’s a parodist, a prankster, who happens to believe in everything he parodies, and he’s inviting you to the party, which begins with just him and a simulated boom box while performing “Psycho Killer,” and gradually grows to include his entire band, as well as another community of musicians of varying backgrounds, as they all work their way toward songs that have now become a taken-for-granted part of our shared pop-cultural tapestry. Byrne’s theme, and his empathy, meshes with the theme of many of director Jonathan Demme’s other pictures: life as a fleeting, varied ride of odd little things, too texturally varied to invite self-pity. Stop Making Sense is a concert film with a narrative, bursting at the seams with bits of invention and passion: the Pablo Ferro titles, the dancing light, the “Big Suit,” Japanese Noh theater conventions, and so on. Bryne’s irresistible conceit is that you’re privy to the birth of his band, as well as their mutual transcendence as they grow and lose themselves in their camaraderie and obsessions. Bowen


Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters

42. Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (Paul Schrader, 1985)

More than a mere account of an artist’s life, Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters attempts to visualize the aesthetic and spiritual arc of its subject, the postwar Japanese author Yukio Mishima (Ken Ogata). The film opens on the day of the artist’s failed coup d’état and subsequent suicide, then traces his life to that point via flashbacks, which move in a linear fashion, tracing the artist’s radical evolution from stuttering, isolated young man to physically fit reactionary whose objections to American postwar occupation and cultural influence inspire a devout cult of militaristic men. But complicating this relatively straightforward narrative are Schrader’s elaborately theatrical stagings of some of Mishima’s novels. Befitting Mishima’s own style, Schrader’s realizations of the author’s work are a mix of traditional and modernist formal sensibilities. Shot against vast but minimal backdrops on a soundstage, these segments replace the naturalistic colors of the 1970-set scenes and black-and-white flashbacks. By folding these vignettes into the larger narrative of Mishima’s life, the film illustrates just how much his art reflected his changing attitudes and beliefs. The film does not shy away from the tragic farce of Mishima’s final day, but in exploring the author’s art, it takes seriously the creative and intellectual journey that led to that point and marks one of Schrader’s finest efforts in documenting his characters’ impulses toward self-annihilation. Cole

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They Live

41. They Live (John Carpenter, 1988)

A streetwise drifter (Roddy Piper) discovers a pair of sunglasses which allow him to see subliminal messages hidden behind every billboard, newspaper, and television commercial in America, as well as the true faces of the masked aliens walking among us, intent to dominate our world in secret. They Live’s anti-consumerist message is so apparent in the action on screen that it doesn’t even qualify as subtextual. But this sort of obvious explication functions, cleverly, as a deliberate ideological misdirect, as the ultimate goal of John Carpenter’s as a work of satire isn’t for us to acknowledge that our world is being taken over by nefarious aliens from outer space, but rather that such a fantastic idea of hypnosis and control is credible only because commercial culture is designed to function in exactly that way. They Live’s point, in other words, isn’t that we ought to be concerned about aliens, but that we don’t need to be concerned about aliens. Advertising and television and the entire world of corporatized control is already so fucked up that science fiction couldn’t imagine a fate for us any more preposterous or, frankly, any worse. Marsh


The Elephant Man

40. The Elephant Man (David Lynch, 1980)

David Lynch’s sophomore film may have been the most awards-friendly film that the Sultan of Weird ever made, but The Elephant Man remains a concentrated dose of Lynchian emotional horror. His telling of the deformed John Merrick’s search for agency is his La Strada, a tragic fable that never lets the viewer forget the harsh reality that informs it. John Hurt’s extraordinary turn finds the soul of the man underneath all the cystic makeup, while Anthony Hopkins’s eyes captivate as Dr. Treves, who takes Merrick in from a freak show where he’s mistreated by the rotten Mr. Bytes (Freddie Jones). Treves introduces Merrick to Victorian high society, as Lynch flips notions of beauty and ugliness. The film’s reputation as a tearjerker belies how the refined theatrical staging and cast, including an imperious Anne Bancroft, allows Lynch to disrupt the mundane cruelty of Victorian life by drawing out the horror of polite etiquette. Ben Flanagan


Sex, Lies and Videotape

39. Sex, Lies and Videotape (Steven Soderbergh, 1989)

Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape feels at once prescient and antiquated, and seemingly by design. It suggests that filmed experience offers an illusory companionship that alienates us from unmediated society—or let’s say a less mediated one. Graham (James Spader) is a variation of an indie-noir character that was particularly prevalent in the late 1980s and ’90s: a drifter with a secret, who in this case videotapes women talking about sex as a way of both participating in and divorcing himself from the messiness of direct experience. The notion of technology as an untrustworthy therapist—as a third party that coaxes out a version of ourselves that’s no more truthful than the facades we assume in our direct contact with people—is more relevant than ever before. Like videotape, social media offers its participants a warped sense of agency, though the latter is capable of being distributed and altered at a terrifyingly accelerated pace that blurs reality so much as to render the concept irrelevant. Watching Sex, Lies, and Videotape now, Graham’s use of home movies suggests social media in its infancy, allowing Graham to empower himself in a fashion that confirms his self-illusions (as a righteous truth-teller), dragging him further into a narcissistic cocoon. Graham’s tapes intensify the very alienation that they were meant to relieve. Bowen


The Thin Blue Line

38. The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, 1988)

Through its emphasis on repetition transmogrified into incoherence, The Thin Blue Line ironically presents the content of a murder trial as fodder for pop fantasy. The connection becomes quite clear with the testimony of Emily Miller, who expresses her fondness for detective stories while making an alarming claim that death tends to follow her wherever she goes. Her explanations aren’t only illegible with regard to her placement at the scene, but they unfold as if a wholly concocted development within the mystery narratives she finds so enthralling. To this end, Morris makes no interjection. At no point is Miller’s testimony actually questioned; Morris straightforwardly reenacts her car chugging by at the alleged time she states. Nevertheless, Miller’s emphasis on hard-boiled fiction retroactively finds its way into the film through the reenactments, since noirish shadows are actually informing the case. Miller testifies to a reality forged through fiction, so Morris forges a fiction through the “truths” of reality. Repetition without context or meaning yields a nightmare, which is precisely where The Thin Blue Line finally lands. The film’s reenactments are this nightmare personified, where a singular instance of violence forms an inescapable prison of insanity, from which there’s no discernible exit, since the pull of pop myth precludes objective justice. Dillard

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Body Double

37. Body Double (Brian De Palma, 1984)

Body Double is another of De Palma’s deconstructions of male impotency, an affliction that the filmmaker clearly ascribes to desire that’s suppressed beneath false, coy sentiment. Yet one of the film’s best and riskiest sequences is conventionally moving anyway, by the sheer force and intensity of De Palma’s craftsmanship. Jake (Craig Wasson) kisses Holly (Melanie Griffith) while playing a hapless nerd in a porno film, a role that ironically reveals an incarnation of Jake that’s truer to the fear and neediness he really feels than the role of the valiant savior he’s attempting to play in his “real” life. The savior guise also inspires yet another role that Jake assumes as a macho film producer, which is also his subliminal parody of the absurdity of his savior quest. The self-reflexivity is nearly endless, but De Palma undermines you again just as you’ve confidently gained your bearings as a distanced spectator of the despairing quixotic meaninglessness of this man’s endeavors: When Jake kisses Holly as he hungrily squeezes her ass, De Palma cuts to the prolonged kiss he shared earlier with the woman whose murder he’s currently trying to avenge, and suddenly we’re directly plugged into the enormity of this man’s cluelessness and torment. By the end of this masterpiece, one of the great and most uniquely American films of the 1980s, we only trust surfaces, which are as fleeting and illusory as anything else. Bowen


A Nos Amours

36. A Nos Amours (Maurice Pialat, 1983)

A 15-year-old grappling with sexuality, emotion, and family, Suzanne (Sandrine Bonnaire) might be the ultimate outsider in Maurice Pialat’s oeuvre, yet the filmmaker also sees her as something of a mystery. Introduced at summer camp, sunning herself at the prow of a boat while a Purcell aria throbs on the soundtrack, she’s a distant figurehead; in a Victorian gown reciting archaic lines for a play, she’s an image of genteel literary poise. À Nos Amours would have been a landmark film simply for introducing Sandrine Bonnaire to the medium. The film, a portrait of youthful ferociousness made with wisdom of lived life, opens and closes on close-ups of her face, feasting on her rough beauty, her wide forehead, her alert yet wounded eyes. Her Suzanne is in every scene, and throughout the film one feels a transfixed Pialat steering the still-unformed talent, not so much molding Bonnaire as discovering in tandem with the actress the corporeality, force, and shifting emotional depths that would later mark her greatest performances. Croce


The Killer

35. The Killer (John Woo, 1989)

John Woo’s orgies of violence are often described as “balletic,” but operatic may be a more fitting description. From the Catholic church decorated by rows upon rows of searingly bright white candles where The Killer both begins and ends, to the lachrymose slow track that peers through a water-streaked window at Chow Yun-Fat’s killer with a soul (who might as well be singing a rueful soliloquy), Woo’s aesthetics deal in the grandiose settings, declarative poses, and broad themes of opera. It’s no coincidence, then, that music and singing play such an important role in the filmmaker’s breakout action thriller, in which a hitman tries to make good by the singer, Jennie (Sally Yeh), who he inadvertently blinded during one of his hitjobs gone wrong (a seemingly regular occurrence for him). The overblown dramatic irony of the tragic finale—where two blinded lovers crawl right past each other, failing to reunite before one of them expires from his wounds—confirms the film as at least as much Wagnerian fantasy as it is gory action-noir. Brown


Modern Romance

34. Modern Romance (Albert Brooks, 1981)

Nearly as much as Jerry Lewis, Albert Brooks’s comic persona is defined by its unlikability. Instead of the little-guy identification of Chaplin or Keaton, he opts for inquiries of aggrieved male neediness, rigorously free of soothing cuteness. The grim self-absorption that abducted the camera’s mock-documentary focus in Real Life takes center stage in Modern Romance, a romantic comedy where the romance is perpetually on the verge of destruction. Brooks’s ruthless scrutiny of irrational jealously unexpectedly marks the film as a distant relative of Él, just as Brooks’s style can be as deceptively simple as Luis Buñuel’s. Mary (Kathryn Harrold) wonders if Robert (Brooks) can tell “real love” from “movie love,” before he says he can and woos her with a line from Easy Rider; to further the self-reflexivity, Brooks shows us the nuts and bolts of the medium itself, as Robert adds sounds to images in the editing room, as if educating the critics who cannot gauge how cinematic his work can be. The finale set at a mountain cabin, with the pair’s romantic getaway crumbling under the heft of Robert’s obsession, provides both punchline and culmination to the hilarious-cum-harrowing investigation. It’s telling that Stanley Kubrick was a fan of the film, for the shot of Robert watching from the cabin window as Mary makes a phone call could have come right out of The Shining. Croce

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Nostalghia

33. Nostalghia (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1983)

Andrei Tarkovsky, arguably Russia’s preeminent poet of the spirit, proved that while a he could leave his homeland in the name of artistic freedom, he could still be imprisoned by the memories he took with him. Shot in Italy and written by Tarkovsky and Tonino Guerra, this film explores this acute form of nostalgia through a spiritually wearied poet, Andrei Gorchakov (Oleg Yankovskiy), who’s traveled to Italy to research the life of a composer who studied in Bologna during the late 1700s before returning to Russia to hang himself. Perhaps Tarkovsky’s most opaque film, Nostalghia is nonetheless one of his most personal. Not only are Tarkovsky’s own feelings about leaving Russia and his family reflected in Gorchakov, but another side of him is reflected in Domenico (Erland Josephson). When Gorchakov visits Domenico in his home, a bombed-out looking space with a ceiling that lets rain in and the illogical equation “1 + 1 = 1” scrawled on the wall, Domenico takes a bottle of olive oil, pours two drops in his hand, and says, “One drop plus one drop makes a bigger drop, not two.” What Tarkovsky and Guerra, who has used a similar message in his script for Red Desert, are saying is that Gorchakov and Domenico are two sides of the same coin: The artist and the madman understand each other because they are part of the same person. Because of how abstract Nostalghia is, this is merely one of many allegorical aspects of a film that leaves itself open for interpretation. Kalvin Henely


Hannah and Her Sisters

32. Hannah and Her Sisters (Woody Allen, 1986)

Upon its release, Hannah and Her Sisters became Woody Allen’s biggest box-office hit, and it still stands as the filmmaker’s urtext, delivering a tapestry of episodic sketches that switch between comedy and drama as the characters, members of an upper-middle-class New York acting family, grapple with love and death, faith and infidelity. Michael Caine gives an ingenious turn as Hannah’s (Mia Farrow) horny husband, whose darting eyes illustrate the kind of thoughts he’d rather keep to voiceover, while Max von Sydow sends up his own persona brilliantly as Frederick, a pretentious and reclusive artist. But it’s Barbara Hershey, Diane Wiest, and Farrow who ground the film into more than a collection of non sequiturs with their superlative take on sisterhood. Allen structures the drama to pay off Farrow’s Hannah late on in the film, a woman who “gives everything and never needs anything back.” Hannah and Her Sisters moves with the clip of a great novel, a film of such generosity that simple life lessons feel like vast breakthroughs. Flanagan


Shoah

31. Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985)

Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah is an angry landmark of demystification, an invaluable refute to more conventional works that seek to contain the atrocities of the Holocaust with reassuring implications of its freakish irrationality. Lanzmann often distinguishes himself from many documentarians in fashions that are so quiet as to be nearly taken for granted. Most importantly, he omits a number of key elements of cinematic artifice that might enable us to distance ourselves from his subject. There’s no narration to tie large swaps of footage together with grand, sweeping through lines, no re-enactments to goose audiences with conventional drama, and no musical score to conveniently cue Pavlovian emotional responses. Lanzmann doesn’t wallow in the murders and torture and psychological warfare; he allows those details to pop out at you with a jarring matter of factness in between discussions of ramps and travel forms, such as one Nazi’s stomach-churning admission that a camp’s ground was moving from the bodily gas of the corpses buried beneath. At one point, Abraham Bomba, a Holocaust survivor and barber by trade, discusses how he removed the hair of female Jews in line for the gas chambers while cutting a man’s hair in the present, and you can’t help but wonder what that client must be thinking. It’s that sort of detail that establishes Shoah as a masterpiece; in this free-associative film the death of the past and the life of the present comingle in ways beyond anyone’s understanding. Bowen


Ran

30. Ran (Akira Kurosawa, 1985)

Akira Kurosawa’s status as the all-time greatest cinematic interpreter of Shakespeare was sealed with Ran, his final and perhaps most overwhelming epic. The resplendent color cinematography and epic master shots establish the pomp and majesty of Emperor Hidetora’s (Tatsuya Nakadai) domain, but as the monarch’s ungrateful and conniving children conspire to overthrow him, the film turns its sweeping style against itself, minimizing its characters against landscapes and suffocating them in castles that become increasingly claustrophobic as armies close in around them. Kurosawa’s most expressionistic film, Ran slowly desaturates the chromatic splendor of its settings even as it heightens the use of red as fire and blood fill the frame. Through it all, Nakadai gives his finest performance for the director, modulating Hidetora’s explosive anger and supreme confidence into a rupture of anguish and bewilderment. The image of the traumatized, dethroned emperor appearing at the top of the steps of his burning palace, his face literally ashen and white with ghostly Noh makeup to make him a zombified husk of a man, is one of cinema’s most incendiary images, a heart-stopping depiction of a man confronting his hubris on a colossal scale. Cole

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Vagabond

29. Vagabond (Agnès Varda, 1985)

Agnès Varda’s career-long suspicion of any conclusive vérité that might be extracted from cinema makes for a film that revolves around ambiguities and questions rather than big statements. Vagabond sets out to reconstruct the life of a dead woman, Mona (Sandrine Bonnaire), through a series of rambling flashbacks punctuated by uniformly terse, direct-to-camera testimonies from people who were acquainted with her. As the film moves from scenario to scenario, we meet men who found her sexually unyielding, overly idealistic, or unappreciative of their charity, and women who were fascinated or repulsed by (or even jealous of) her complete disregard for social norms. Highlights among these characters include a hippie who gives Mona shelter; an agronomist who takes her on as a kind of sociological project; a Tunisian migrant worker who promises to take care of her; and a maid who views her as a romantic figure capable of drawing out passion in men. In this tangle of flimsy interpretations, Mona hardens into a new cinematic archetype: a young female rebel who’s genuinely without a cause. But neither Varda nor her audience is capable of summoning interpretations that are not ideological or poetic, even though Mona’s journey is strictly non-ideological and non-poetic. We are led back to the devastating old cliché that nothing and no one can be fully known, since knowledge is dependent on competing subjectivities. Chan


E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

28. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (Steven Spielberg, 1982)

As omniscient as Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is about the bond a lonely young boy, Elliott (Henry Thomas), shares with the alien he all too briefly calls his best friend, some of the film’s most pitch-perfect moments subtly suggest how children regard the inscrutable behavior of adults, especially parents. The film, among other things, pulls grown-ups back into the vortex of feelings they’ve either repressed with age or have allowed to break toward bitter instead of sweet. Spielberg in his prime was so adept at reflecting the innocent simplicity of childhood feelings that his talent seems to draw out the worst suspicions among life’s lost souls, those to whom the concepts of purity and simplicity have somehow become weapons in the mind’s battle with the heart. E.T., an alien visitor whose biological makeup ensures that his stay on Earth won’t be for long (which he realizes when he makes the tear-jerking decision to sever the bio-rhythmic tether between him and Elliott), is something of an abstraction for the grief Elliott feels upon his father’s abandonment. E.T.’s departing aphorism, “I’ll be right here,” is sage advice for anyone who understands the profound loss that Elliott feels and the capacity for him to forgive. Henderson


The Green Ray

27. The Green Ray (Éric Rohmer, 1986)

As Delphine, the lonely but defiant Paris secretary at the center of The Green Ray, Marie Rivière creates an emotionally rich portrait of a lovelorn woman who transfers her energies into an anxious quest for the ideal summer vacation. In this fifth part of his six-film cycle of “Comedies and Proverbs,” Eric Rohmer spends the first 80 of its 98 minutes treading territory that most movie romances consign to the backstory, as Delphine, in the wake of a two-year-old broken engagement she’s yet to put behind her, makes unfulfilling trips to a trio of resorts, encountering souls both nonplussed and sympathetic while, by her expectations as a modern single female, not “meeting anyone.” Those who find Rohmer heroines difficult—that is, demanding because they’re three-dimensional, non-formulaic creations with an intricate set of foibles and needs—might even be won over by the depth and poignancy of Delphine, one of its maker’s most generously etched characters, perhaps given its extra layer of vigor by Rivière’s credit as a collaborator on the scenario. Weber


Something Wild

26. Something Wild (Jonathan Demme, 1986)

Few directors have tackled social and personal shape-shifting as concretely or as intuitively as Jonathan Demme. Throughout his diverse yet unified oeuvre, characters are uncannily aware of what makes them tick, to the point that exposition is occasionally bypassed altogether. Something Wild, one of his best films, stylizes this strength of personality a step further with people who are addicted to reinvention, both as a means of expression and as a method of exposing absurdity. When Lulu (Melanie Griffith) catches go-getter businessman Charles Driggs (Jeff Daniels) skipping out on a lunch check in a Manhattan diner, she’s wearing a straight, black wig and faux-voodoo accoutrements around her neck and wrists; before the film hits the halfway mark, she’s exchanged this for a cozy, floral sundress and cropped, bleach-blond hair. By the time Something Wild ends, she’s dragged Driggs through at least four iterations of herself, and done it all with a sarcastic smile not for the thrill of the moment, but the depth of possibility at her fingertips. Lanthier

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Blade Runner

25. Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)

The dying Earth of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? reeks of pathos, dust, and decay, but it seems functional—beset by entropy, but functional all the same. The grunge and rot of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, by contrast, owes a sizable debt to the legacies of film noir and steampunk: a future defined by overdevelopment, underregulation, hubris, and greed. The film is fueled by iconography: icons that don’t always need to point outside the text but have a self-sustaining power of their own. That’s why Roy (Rutger Hauer) is the titanic antihero, whose sheer magnitude as a synthetic being embarrasses the ineffectual Deckard (Harrison Ford), the ex-flatfoot whose character arc is a slender thread of fuck-ups and accidental victories. Nearly a minor character in the book, almost on the level of some expendable Dragnet hoodlum, Roy is transformed into the film’s evil superhuman, a universal adaptor capable of being fixed with any major philosophical lens (Nietzsche, Kant, Descartes, etc.). No one mourns in the film, except in a stolen moment (when Roy discovers Daryl Hannah’s defeated Pris), and Scott uses a reliable surrogate for tears to pay respects, on our behalf, when Roy’s spirit finally takes flight. Tears in the rain, indeed. Christley


Berlin Alexanderplatz

24. Berlin Alexanderplatz (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1980)

For its first 13 hours, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz psychologizes Franz Biberkopf (Günter Lamprecht), a small-time crook eking out a living in Weimar-era Germany, with passages that place him variously on the pendulum between victim and aggressor. In the last segment—a self-described two-hour epilogue—Biberkopf seems to have wandered into a different film (and maybe even a different world) altogether, with needle drops from Kraftwerk, Janis Joplin, and Lou Reed announcing the man’s carnivalesque descent into culturally induced madness. Though it was made for television, Berlin Alexanderplatz finds Fassbinder demanding the return of a politically minded hysteria and impoliteness to art—something television has historically tried to neuter. Of all of Fassbinder’s work, Berlin Alexanderplatz remains the most unhinged in both its scope and tone, making it an essential last gasp of a sensibility in European art cinema where leftist politics and filmmaking were one and the same. Dillard


Dead Ringers

23. Dead Ringers (David Cronenberg, 1988)

Dead Ringers feels authentically dangerous, as if some sort of often deeply submerged social tension between the genders is reaching an unlikely artistic exorcism. All of David Cronenberg’s films are neurotic about sex, though Dead Ringers is most explicitly concerned with the resentment that brilliant, accomplished, socially awkward men can nurse toward attractive women that they feel they’re privileged, yet unfairly unable, to enjoy. This subtext also fueled The Fly, but here there’s no charm or genre-film gratification to dilute the bitterness of the brew—yet there is a deep well of tenderness that prevents the film from becoming monotonously cynical. (The gynecological torture instruments—the scariest props in any Cronenberg film—embody feelings of desire that are warped by bitterness and isolation.) As Elliot and Beverly Mantle, the doomed twin doctors who eventually succumb to their internal sickness, Jeremy Irons gives the two most strikingly intimate and imaginative performances of his career. You forget the stunt of a man playing his own brother, and come to accept both siblings as the most complicated human creations of Cronenberg’s career. Bowen


Mauvais Sang

22. Mauvais Sang (Leos Carax, 1986)

Mauvais Sang, a playfully Godardian toying with film-noir tropes, concerns a rebellious teen, Alex (Denis Lavant), teaming up with his deceased father’s associates in Paris to steal a cure to an AIDS-like virus called STBO. Leos Carax’s use of close-ups and elliptical montage tends to sideline the story in favor of more personal moments that also employ experimental touches to communicate an idea or a feeling, like the scene in which, through a zoom and sped-up camera, it appears as if Juliette Binoche’s Anna is flying as she flaps her arms and runs down an airstrip. Although Carax treats his story unseriously, it’s perhaps the lyrically depicted romance between Alex and Anna, his partner-in-crime’s (Michel Piccoli) girlfriend, that he feels most strongly about. Mauvais Sang is a film beyond story, one characterized by an infatuation with the medium itself: the edit, the close-up, the camera angle, movement, colors. Carax uses these tools to vivaciously celebrate cinema, as well as Lavant and Binoche (who he was romantically involved with at the time), and his love for both is infectious. For the filmmaker, love is the reason for life: He even has the STBO virus explained to Alex as transmissible between people who have sex without love. Kalvin Henely

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Paris, Texas

21. Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders, 1984)

As with the warped, often menacing faux-sisterhood binding Sissy Spacek and Shelley Duvall in 3 Women, the unorthodox bond between Travis (Harry Dean Stanton) and his abandoned son, Hunter (Hunter Carson), rests tenuously on a foundation of bewildering regret and the irrepressible lamentations of a shamanic id. Travis’s transformation throughout his roundtrip trek from low desert to high and back again is subtle enough to entirely ignore—though he does go from refusing to speak to haplessly responsible brother Walt (Dean Stockwell) to embracing a newfound fluency in the language of imperfect reconciliation by the film’s end—but Wim Wenders’s emphasis, as usual, is on the volatile mutation of the journey rather than its lasting effects on the journeyman. Unlike the characters in Jim Jarmusch’s travelogues, we don’t fantasize Travis or Jane (Nastassia Kinski) as autonomous beings with lives that assert themselves past the end credits. We instead think back on winding dirt roads exhaling furious clouds, the gray concrete of freeways caught in an impromptu firmament with a disinterested sky, and multi-layered, nocturnal rainbows of meretricious neon. Paris, Texas may be missing a crucial piece of authentic Americana, but it still evokes an America most Americans yearn to gaze on. An America as thorny and carnivorous as a hawk talon, as raw and smug as a downtown mural, and as sweetly enigmatic as a vacant lot that doesn’t—that can’t—exist. Lanthier


Distant Voices, Still Lives

20. Distant Voices, Still Lives (Terence Davies, 1988)

Not the least among its achievements, Terence Davies’s Distant Voices, Still Lives offers a crystallization of the appeal of the musical. An odd linkage, to be sure, since the genre’s trademark studio boisterousness would seem a world away from the kitchen-sink dreariness of the director’s mood piece about his years growing up with his working-class family in post-WWII Liverpool, dominated by his abusive ogre of a father. Yet Davies transcends the facile trap of misery porn by tapping into the basic notion of musicals as enlivening: music as direct expression, music as emotion felt. Cinema is the most unashamedly emotional of arts, and the musical feeds in no small part on repressed, frustrated sensations—the better to explode them with bursts of melodious bravura. What are musical numbers, after all, if not lyrically stylized declarations of feelings that could not be expressed any other way? Time, joy, and family are transitory, yet Davies knows that the camera’s ability to capture them borders on the divine. I can think of few more moving expressions of this than the sublime ascending crane from the huddled umbrellas outside a theater that dissolves into a gentle pan over the rapt, weeping faces of the audience inside. From rain to tears, and set to the strains of the Love Is a Many Splendored-Thing score, Davies exults cinema’s transformative powers past, present, and future. Croce


Love Streams

19. Love Streams (John Cassavetes, 1984)

John Cassavetes’s Love Streams is the grand summation of a career devoted to prodding at all the messy, complicated layers of life. Two distant siblings must each contend with upheavals in their lives: Robert (Cassavetes), an alcoholic author, learns that he has a son, Albie (Jakob Shaw), and must square the boy’s presence with his usual bacchanalia, while Sarah (Gena Rowlands) reels from a divorce from her husband (Seymour Cassel) and the maddening blow of her daughter requesting her dad to take sole custody. Other filmmakers might have been content to simply stick with this premise, wringing humor from Robert’s befuddled entry into fatherhood and Sarah’s abandonment issues, but Cassavetes instead uses these shake-ups to loosen the characters and observe how they react. The title alludes to a philosophy that Sarah clings to like driftwood as she faces the indifference of her ex-husband and daughter, that love is “continuous, it doesn’t stop.” But a stream, like any flowing body of water, also takes the path of least resistance, and it responds to sudden obstacles with diversions that can magnify and ultimately chart a vastly different course. It’s that potential for slowly reverberating change and growth that Cassavetes stresses with the film, and he tracks these mounting reverberations with subtle variations in his own directing style. Cole


Possession

18. Possession (Andrzej Żuławski, 1981)

Possession’s first half comes on like Scenes from a Marriage as directed by Lars von Trier and played at 2x speed, a lacerating depiction of disintegration both marital and psychological, while the latter half steadily morphs into Repulsion by way of Cronenberg’s The Brood when Anna (Isabelle Adjani) holes up in a rundown flat and proceeds to dispatch any man brazen enough to disturb her love-in with a tentacular monstrosity she most likely miscarried months earlier. But such a high-concept laundry list can be a bit misleading, as Andrzej Żuławski’s sensibilities are most assuredly his own, and Possession bears its maker’s unmistakable stamp. From film to film, regardless of the works’ generic pigeonholing, Żuławski tends toward the psychodramatic of a particularly philosophical, even metaphysical and theological, bent. And in much the same way that Possession blurs and blends genres, it also inextricably entangles the personal and the political, so that Mark and Anna’s untimely end atop a baroquely wrought spiral staircase seemingly triggers nuclear apocalypse, and the film ends on a fittingly ambiguous note: As sirens blare and the lights dim, Mark’s newly minted double (which is the creature’s evolutionary outcome), tries in vain to gain entry to the apartment where Anna’s own doppelganger directs her feline green gaze into the camera eye. Wilkins

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Where Is the Friend’s House

17. Where Is the Friend’s House (Abbas Kiarostami, 1987)

The films in Abbas Kiarostami’s Koker trilogy have a sense of immediacy—an in-the-moment exactitude—that adds up to an expansive vision of life. After watching Where Is the Friend’s House?, And Life Goes On, and Through the Olive Trees, especially in close succession, it may feel as if you’ve actually navigated the Iranian farming village of Koker, perhaps even strolled the iconic zig-zag trail up a hill to what appears to be the neighboring village of Poshteh. In these films, Kiarostami revels in narrative, pictorial, and verbal patterns, which he revises to express the open-endedness of life, as well as the porous boundaries between “reality” and art. In Where Is the Friend’s House?, Kiarostami spins one of the greatest of all films out of a child’s urge to return a notebook to his classmate. Dramatizing this dilemma, Kiarostami offers a tapestry of life, revealing how the domestic textures of Koker embody its class issues and politics. Trying to find his friend, Ahmad (Babak Ahmadpour) navigates multiple definitions of authority and varying generations of his family and neighbors. At first, Ahmad regards adults as impediments to his generosity, though the boy gradually comes to see that these men and women have their own vulnerabilities, which Kiarostami expresses in images of rapt beauty. The filmmaker renders common acts, such as an elderly craftsman’s task of taking off his shoes by his doorway, as emotionally revelatory moments of process. Bowen


The Thing

16. The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982)

For all of the Grand Guignol overload of its special effects, The Thing is first and foremost an atmospheric film, one predicated on the claustrophobia and paranoia generated by its remote Antarctic-base setting. It’s there that a scientific crew discovers, then falls prey to an alien that can assume the form of any living being it touches, forcing the men stationed at the base to question the true identities of those around them. This is fitting material for director John Carpenter, who ironically used his biggest budget to return to the kind of small-scale, inward-looking horror of Assault on Precinct 13 and Halloween. But if the physical scope of the film is narrow, its tone is one of vast, cosmic terror, influenced in no small part by H.P. Lovecraft. Camera movement, with the exception of a few rushing point-of-view shots, is stately and patient throughout The Thing, as cold as the base’s frigid surroundings. Carpenter’s clinical atmosphere offers a bedrock of visual calm that only makes the amorphous, reason-defying nature of the alien threat all the more disruptive. Instead of reflecting the mania of the characters, the camera is an objective viewer, which casts a nihilistic pall over The Thing by telegraphing the hopelessness of the characters’ situation. Cole


Blow Out

15. Blow Out (Brian De Palma, 1981)

Though Blow Out isn’t known as one of Brian De Palma’s horror movies, of all his films, it’s the one that feels most like a nightmare. Carrie and The Fury ended with orgasms—frustrated teenagers revenging their oppressors in phantasmagoric releases of pent-up sexual energy. This espionage thriller goes out quietly, with a slow-motion dwindle into personal and political hell. By the end, the viewer half expects to wake up sweating, as if from some terrible dream. De Palma underlines this disillusionment by setting the story up for a heroic conclusion in the traditional Hollywood mold. Instead, the famous “scream” climax and the haunting epilogue that follows serve as a reminder that with political progress always comes loss. Set against the hopeful red-white-and-blue fireworks of Philadelphia’s Liberty Day parade, this tragedy recalls Thomas Jefferson’s wisdom: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Good guys and bad guys both spill blood in Blow Out; one wrong is righted, many more persist. De Palma’s cinematic sentiment, in the spirit of Jefferson, isn’t cynical so much as it is refreshingly frank. Paul Schrodt


The Fly

14. The Fly (David Cronenberg, 1986)

The Fly is proof that David Cronenberg can do anything, including fashioning a surprisingly rich and intimate love triangle from a hokey Vincent Price film. Despite the provocative symbols of decay and mutation as simultaneous enablers and imprisoners, which are common Cronenberg concerns at this point in his career, The Fly is most unsettling for its operatic poignancy (Cronenberg and composer Howard Shore subsequently spun the film off into an opera). The irony of this film is that it’s a remake of a fun but trivial monster movie that further personalizes its distinctive creator’s obsessions. Like The Dead Zone before it, The Fly features intense yet remarkably engaging performances, the best of its respective actors’ careers, and their likeability releases Cronenberg’s kinkiness, rendering it more intimate and relatable, which is to say that The Fly, for its “mainstream” virtues, is as disturbing as anything the filmmaker has made. It sheds light on his work’s troubled relationship with sex, highlighting sexual alienation as springing from profound self-loathing. The hero’s attempts to correct that self-loathing, with exertions of intellectual control, lead to physical changes that only ironically embody and embolden it. It’s the Raging Bull of nerd-centric horror movies. Bowen

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The King of Comedy

13. The King of Comedy (Martin Scorsese, 1982)

With The King of Comedy, Martin Scorsese ditched the kineticism and operatic flourishes of earlier masterpieces like Raging Bull in favor of tightly coiled static shots inspired by early silent cinema. The film plays like a bizarro version of Taxi Driver, another haunting tale of an alienated loser played by Robert De Niro whose very presence induces bemusement, discomfort, and morbid fascination in those around him. At the film’s heart is Rupert Pupkin, a shameless, fame-hungry schmuck who kidnaps a beloved late-night talk show host (Jerry Lewis, whose sense of bewilderment and contempt are palpable beneath his carefully calibrated deadpan), in a desperate bid to vault himself into the public consciousness. De Niro plays Pupkin as a tacky, low-rent hustler, a man whose every gesture seems to have been rehearsed a hundred times in front of the bathroom mirror. Pupkin’s interior life, glimpsed in fantasy sequences that blur the line between reverie and reality, seems to consist entirely of his own delusions of grandeur and dreams of stardom. And that hollowness is what ultimately makes Pupkin a more frightening figure than Travis Bickle, whose bloody vigilantism is, at the very least, motivated by some sense of moral purpose, however twisted. Pupkin, on the other hand, is driven by little more than a desire to see his own face on TV. Keith Watson


Dekalog

12. Dekalog (Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1989)

Thematically based on one of the Ten Commandments, each of the Dekalog’s episodes branch off into distinct narratives that explore wildly different philosophical topics. But like the looming tower complex that centralizes the series’s characters, these disparate subjects are entwined around a unified vision. Dekalog’s biblical root may suggest didacticism on its face, but whatever morals are advanced by Krzysztof Kieślowski and co-screenwriter Krzysztof Piesiewicz are decidedly ambivalent. The episodes are uniquely aestheticized, befitting their own distinct thematic fixations; Kieślowski even went so far as to employ a different director of cinematography for almost every episode. Kieślowski’s formalism and thematic ambition are all the more impressive given the budgetary limitations of television. The softness of the film stock lends naturalism to otherwise carefully ordered compositions, and the use of Warsaw’s streets keeps the episodes rooted in the world, not just abstract philosophy. Most importantly, the characters never come off as mere mouthpieces for Kieślowski’s visions. No matter how cerebral the plots get, the characters respond to each moral challenge emotionally, and their longing, sadness, and occasional mordant humor makes the series relatable. Cole


RoboCop

11. RoboCop (Paul Verhoeven, 1987)

RoboCop set the tone for much of Dutch auteur Paul Verhoeven’s career in America, and not just because of Kurtwood Smith’s curt command “Bitches leave!” It was a relatively low-budget, high-concept satire in the guise of a relatively high-budget, low-concept trash-a-thon. Corporate backstabbing and a remarkably strong-willed newbie cop combine in the right place at the wrong time to allow the creation of a secret human-robot hybrid. Verhoeven juxtaposes RoboCop’s (Peter Weller) faint pulse of self-recognition against the backdrop of a dehumanizing socio-economic nightmare. But he also couples his skilled filmmaking vulgarity with a very literal vulgarity. When RoboCop comes to the assistance of a poodle-headed woman about to be sexually assaulted in a back alleyway, his keen trigger finger manages to take out the would-be rapist’s crotch by carefully shooting the bullet through the victim’s skirt—right between her thighs. Never has a gesture of chivalry seemed more…icky. Verhoeven’s best and most vulgar American work was still in front of him, but RoboCop still stands as one of the most rude-tempered, rollicking gobs of spit in the face of 1980s politics this side of John Carpenter’s They Live. Henderson


Sans Soleil

10. Sans Soleil (Chris Marker, 1983)

Twenty years after La Jetée, Chris Marker revisited Vertigo, along with pretty much everything else that exists in this and any other universe, in Sans Soleil. The most fully distilled example of Marker’s outlook, the film is a prismatic puzzle box, in which memory is fragmented among a number of points of view until all reasonable reference points are completely stripped away. Pitched somewhere between prayer and jet lag, the film is, in a literal sense, the supposed correspondence from a globetrotting cameraman (“Sandor Krasna,” a pseudonym) read aloud by the woman to whom the letters were sent. It’s not clear who between the two is fully in control of the film, but it hardly matters; with each passing moment, it reinvents itself almost organically. No two people will come away from Sans Soleil with the same impression, nor will a solitary viewer’s multiple viewings yield the same experience. Marker’s film prefigures multimedia and, like what Amy Taubin said of Inland Empire in Film Comment, approximates the experience of being trapped inside the internet and making radical leaps of associative connection…only Marker typically prefigured the technology. Henderson

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Fitzcarraldo

9. Fitzcarraldo (Werner Herzog, 1982)

An appropriately elemental sense of momentum dictates the rhythm of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo. Cinematographer Thomas Mauch’s camera soaks in the density and humidity of the atmosphere, finding an at times overwhelming beauty amid the oppressive conditions. Likewise, no matter the irascible nature of the Klaus Kinski persona, Herzog manages to capture a delirious energy and furious creative commitment perfectly suited to the cavalier ambition of the Fitzcarraldo ethos. Together they represent a kind of irrepressible force which, as first suggested by the brothel madam played by Claudia Cardinale, could have likely moved the mountain over which the two drag their shared weight. When Fitzcarraldo, an ambitious entrepreneur and lover of musical theater who dreams of constructing an opera house in a secluded region of the Peruvian Amazon, and his ever-dwindling conspirators finally bring their 320-ton steamship down the mud-steeped incline and into the even more perilous waters of the Ucayali rapids, it’s apparent that what this journey represents is less a test of will than a complete indoctrination of the creative spirit. Cronk


Come and See

8. Come and See (Elem Klimov, 1985)

Come and See suggests an imprint from another world and time. Imagine the phantasmagoria of Underground’s god-forsaken final scenes stretched out to two-and-a-half surreal hours. Relentless and beatific in its artistry, Elem Klimov’s masterwork is shot as if from the point of view of a wild animal skulking for its prey and retreating from the bones that remain (pity young Florya cannot run the course of his life backward like the newsreel carnage cut into the film during its final minutes), evincing the cataclysmic psychological toll of war on the human psyche via dissociative manipulation of sound and image. A flash of rainbow trickles through gaps in forest leaves like a projector beam, a heron appears out of nowhere after bombs fall from the heavens like seed pods from ambient-drone spaceships, hitting the ground like the foot stomps of giants and leaving a young child—and, in turn, the audience—nearly deaf and dumb in their wake. A film about the nature of war (its sick intrusion) and pictures, the ability of the latter to capture the former in order to convey—no, demand—that we not only come and see, but madly, truly, deeply witness and remember. Gonzalez


Videodrome

7. Videodrome (David Cronenberg, 1983)

This hard, sleazy riff on a famous Marshall McLuhan quote (“the medium is the message”) is one of the great visionary horror movies, and potentially the most prescient. It marries disconcertingly erotic images with David Cronenberg’s great theme of misleadingly frivolous technology as an insidious initiator of ambiguous new evolutions. Though TV is the medium under consideration, all of the film’s observations can be adapted, with chilling ease, to suit the ongoing proliferation of laptops, cellphones, the internet, you name it. Dialogue regularly appears to be piped in from the future, such as an observation—that we will all have special names for our personas on TV—that bridges Andy Warhol’s “15 minutes” quotation with the rise of a multiple-username culture that renders specificities of identity and humanity moot. The ghastly, daringly sexualized special effects are, eerily, Videodrome’s one quaint gesture, as they imbue technology with a disgusting yet comforting tactility that’s rapidly disappearing from a culture that’s slipping into a cloud of ever-shifting soft data. Bowen


Fanny and Alexander

6. Fanny and Alexander (Ingmar Bergman, 1982)

One of the great films about childhood and memory, Fanny and Alexander is also a devastatingly powerful visual treatise on the art of storytelling and its influence. It’s not hard to see, in the film’s first half, Oscar’s (Allan Edwall) unyielding passion for the theater, even though he claims to be horrid at it. But for Ingmar Bergman, the son of a horridly strict Lutheran minister, Oscar is the theater itself, the memory of Christmas plays staged at his father’s church, and the Ekdahl brood is a menagerie of what he imagined and wished family would be. And, at one point, he recreates a pivotal moment in his life as an artist with Alexander (Bertil Guve): a magic lantern show performed for Fanny (Pernilla Allwin), involving a gothic horror story. In this way, Alexander’s fantasy worlds can clearly be seen to move from being projected externally (with his family) to internally (at his stepfather’s dungeon-like abode) and back to externally by the time he’s resting his head on his grandmother’s lap as she reads over Strindberg’s A Dream Play, a work essentially about forgiving the faults and furies of humankind. In a way, the film was Bergman’s swan song, seeing as the television films and plays he directed afterward all seemed to play out like some lovely postscript. It’s a plea to indulge fantasy with direction and a heartbreakingly sincere farewell to life in all its real horrors and constant surprises—a chisel taken to his own blank tombstone and the last deep roar of expression from a great artist. Cabin

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Raging Bull

5. Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, 1980)

Jake LaMotta (Robert De Niro) can be observed, contemplated, judged, but never really understood. When we first meet him, he’s long given up his lifelong battle with the bulge. His ballooned body stuffed into a suit, he puffs on a cigar as he recites a rhythmic little poem about his past life as a prizefighter. “That’s entertainment!” Jake says at the end of his piece, repeating the phrase in a lower, perhaps more contemplative tone as Martin Scorsese cuts from a close-up of his bloated face circa 1964 to a matching shot of him in 1941, leaner and about to be decked by opponent Sugar Ray Robinson in the boxing ring. Such a structure would seem to indicate a certain ruminative quality to Raging Bull, as the LaMotta of later years recalls the path that ended with him fat, alone, and working as a floundering nightclub performer. One of the triumphs of the film comes from how fascinating Jake remains despite him gleaning little to no awareness regarding his inner rage and crippling sense of sexual insecurity. So many biopics insist on squeezing their real-life subjects through the pop-psychology strainer and catching whatever meager insights dribble out: canned recapitulations of damaged childhoods, meteoric rises, and substance-addled downfalls that reveal more about the schematics of contemporary screenwriting than truths about the individuals at hand. The extent to which Raging Bull sidesteps such reductionism is remarkable. Matthew Connolly


The Shining

4. The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)

It’s the experience more so than the actual content of The Shining that radiates cold, anti-humanly indifferent terror. But Stanley Kubrick does hedge his bets by building in ambiguities, winding up in the film’s final question mark of a shot (so wholly different from the sunny ending of the novel that you can sort of empathize with Stephen King when he speaks out against this adaptation). Having conflated the sadistic struggle between a man and his family into a horrific epic tragedy, Kubrick slaps the film back into a reversal of 2001: A Space Odyssey’s coda, swapping accelerated evolution in favor of a regression so primordially violent it disrupts the fabric of time. In that sense, the film’s chronological Mobius warp places it outside of the context of something like The Haunting and more in line with Last Year in Marienbad (itself a pretty terrifying film, at least on the surface). Like Resnais’s gothic nightmare, Kubrick’s The Shining dwells at the outer limits of what can be thought of as a genre film, stretching the definition, filling it out, leaving it richer in its wake. Henderson


Blue Velvet

3. Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986)

Cut and dried, Blue Velvet rolls together David Lynch’s two diametrically opposed, but indivisible, views of American life: One is the “white picket fences” façade, the other its grimy, badly infected underbelly. None approach his film in terms of tone and control, the fusion of unlike halves mastered with a kind of honest-faced plainness that was, in some ways, the one truly unprecedented part of Lynch’s personality, up to that point expressed most freely in the organic perversions of Eraserhead and the claustrophobic industrial cityscapes of The Elephant Man. A conventionally appealing quality of Blue Velvet is the way its “plunge” into dark territories from unambiguously bright ones (played out twice, once in montage, then more gradually in narrative) is hitched to a character (played by Kyle MacLachlan) by two classic dramatic hooks: the plucky young detective trying to solve a mystery and the good-faced young boy who’s trying to win the heart of the town’s prettiest girl. But these things, in fact the whole dramatic trajectory, seem incidental to the way the images of Lumberton and its various inner zones are a lot like Lynch’s work sculpture and painting, ever infused with the inner life of nightmares, with an exploded chicken here and a baby-doll head there. Christley


Do the Right Thing

2. Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989)

In his uncontestable masterpiece, Do the Right Thing, Spike Lee deftly follows the actions of two dozen people on what turns out to be one of the longest, hottest, most memorable, and maybe most tragic days of their lives. And he does it without so much as a single lugubrious or extraneous moment. Even before Bed-Stuy’s race relations unravel in the heat, Lee’s film strives for insistent political consciousness, which is to say he doesn’t just bring up political topics but dares to actually take positions. Some reviewers, largely the same nervous nellies who warned the film might incite race riots, took issue with Lee’s perceived free pass to eschew political correctness, especially in Bush I’s “kinder, gentler nation.” But that’s precisely the point of Do the Right Thing. It takes political concepts away from the lip service of cloistered authority figures (including the film’s dirty cops) and dissects them through the lives of those who are forced to live by them. In this context, the radio DJ Mister Señor Love Daddy’s stately, nearly two-and-a-half-minute roll call of great black musicians carries as much weight of the Emancipation Proclamation. Lee’s deceptively vibrant pop comedy (“Fuck Frank Sinatra!” “Fuck Michael Jackson!”) is both freewheeling and, as the film’s final half hour reveals, extraordinarily calculated. When tempers spiral out of control and grave injustice is meted out to one of Bed-Stuy’s inhabitants, the disruption is a direct slap to shake audiences out of complacency. Henderson


L’Argent

1. L’Argent (Robert Bresson, 1983)

L’Argent feeds the notion of fate through a stringent, Rube Goldbergian social machinery that results in the destruction of a fuel truck driver’s livelihood and sanity preceding a series of homicides. And it all seems to stem from the innocuous chicanery of two schoolboys and their forged Franc note that the employees of a camera shop try to pass off on the driver, Yvon Targe (Christian Patey), who later gets nailed by a coffee shop’s waiter. With the same sort of amplification of violence and respect for the laws of chance that brings to mind Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” L’Argent is like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer recited in iambic pentameter. Robert Bresson might be working with a disorienting focus on chosen details, but his narrative momentum and editing rhythms are fleet, never giving any of the characters any time to contemplate an alternate course of action that might alleviate their melancholy. Throughout, Bresson’s framing and editing are both razor-sharp and oblique. The actual murders remain off screen, with ellipsis and insert shots of an alarmed family dog paralleling how the depictions of Yvon shoving the coffee shop employee and the country husband slapping his wife’s face dance around any actual on-screen violence. Ultimately, L’Argent manages to convey coherence between rigid moral dogma and sympathetic multiplicity. It’s mind-blowing. Henderson

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