In a development that very much sounds like the opposite of good, the 80s marked the end of the filmmaker-driven New Hollywood era of the 70s and shepherded in the studio-dominated, marketing-first reign of the “high concept picture”, in which films had to be stupid enough to be sellable in a sentence or perhaps sometimes two.
But this was also a decade that saw some of the greats put out some of their greatest. And hey, selling movies makes money. And movies need money – even the good ones. Sift through enough of those mass-market turds and I promise you that eventually, you’ll come upon diamonds. It was the eighties after all! Ten years of bright lights, and big hair, and big noise and… the eighties! All that… stuff! Come on. Let’s get sifting.
10 - Full Metal Jacket
Many would have Platoon on this list as their representative from the Arty 80s Vietnam War Film category. But many also like coriander and many voted for Boris Johnson. Many are not to be trusted.
Full Metal Jacket – whose exploration of the brutality of preparing men for war is then amplified by the more-brutal-still depiction of war itself – wins because, as is Stanley Kubrick’s custom, every shot could be a movie poster. You could watch this film with the volume off and still enjoy a couple of hours of looking at a series of remarkable images. But – here’s a tip you won’t find anywhere else – watch this film with the volume on. It makes it even better. You’ll thank me later.
9 - Raging Bull
De Niro’s Jake LaMotta is indeed raging – with his boxing opponents (helpful) but also his wife and pretty much everyone else he knows (not so helpful). He stalks the ring and his apartment and the whole world with terrifying tension, a grudge against God. Scorsese records it in stunning, stark black and white.
It’s not what you’d call a “feel-good film”. More of a feel-bad film, truth be told. But the way it makes you feel bad. That’s the good stuff.
8 - The Shining
See above re: Kubrick’s remarkable images etc (and a helpful tip about volume), but add in Jack Nicholson playing it more unhinged than a dodgy doorframe, a story by Stephen King and a creepy haunted hotel up on an isolated mountainside. It’s a recipe that’ll have you making mincemeat of your bottom lip.
7 - Raiders of the Lost Ark
Now see this. This is the 80s. A swashbuckling archeologist – Harrison Ford, no less – must stop the Nazis from getting their hands on the Ark of the Covenant (as seen in: The Bible) and making their army invincible? Yes please and thank you.
Borderline dangerous for how much it’ll make you want to drop everything and just head out on, I don’t know, some big ill-conceived adventure somewhere, the booby-trapped blockbuster is a lesson in keeping silliness in sight while staying just the right side of it all the way through.
6 - My Neighbour Totoro
The bad thing about My Neighbour Totoro is that it’ll make you miss an achingly beautiful world that you can’t go to because it doesn’t exist. The good thing about it is that it’ll let you (yes, even grubby horrible you) spend an hour and a half in that world, and afterwards you’ll feel like you’ve been to some strange kind of spiritual car-wash where they scrub all the nasty gunk off your soul. (Is that church? Is that what people do at church?) The world of Totoro might not exist, but the one where someone came up with him and his cat/bus mate and appointed them to watch over an adorable child does, and you’ll feel better for being reminded of that.
5 - Ordinary People
I see you, Sally Rooney. I see where you’re getting your ideas from.
Long before Normal People, we had Ordinary People. And how ordinary they were. In fairly un-eighties-like fashion, Robert Redford’s directorial debut follows, not a spaceship or a rocket or a Spandex Dance Bonanza™, but a middle-class American family carrying the mess of the loss of their eldest son through their pristine suburban existence.
The film’s strength is the nuance with which it develops each character’s role within the family. Timothy Hutton’s tortured surviving son. Mary Tyler Moore’s seemingly-upstanding wife. And Donald Sutherland (oh, Donald Sutherland)’s overly stoic father. A decidedly under-the-top masterpiece.
4 - When Harry Met Sally
He’s a bit of a prick isn’t he, that Harry? An awful prick. An arrogant prick. But he’s not condemned to be a prick and he’s also maybe not actually a prick at all, just someone who sometimes does a very convincing impression of one. And that’s one of the many virtues of this film. It doesn’t do what a weaker film would and write off a man’s prickishness as “charm” – it reveals and changes him, for the better. It makes him less of a prick.
It’s also probably the incumbent cinematic interrogation of a question as fundamental as “can men and women simply be friends?” And provided people are willing to make the small effort required to update that question into a less heteronormative “can people who might be attracted to each other remain friends instead of trying to become something more romantic/sexual”, there’s going to be mileage in this old banger for many years to come.
3 - Stop Making Sense
From the band whose songs probably feature on the soundtrack of at least one film you think should be on this list but isn’t, Stop Making Sense is often described as the greatest “concert film” of all time. But to relegate its success to this relatively niche sub-genre is to under-appreciate how well it stands up, with its cinematography and its lighting and its directorial flair, against members of the much larger genre of the non-concert film (aka “film”).
A revelatory meeting of documentary and performance. And of David Byrne and his massive suit. Fa-fa-fa-fa, fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa.
2 - Do the Right Thing
Do the Right Thing’s reputation has been buoyed by its place on the right side of a controversy in which the Academy managed, according to what is now an unsurpassable consensus, to Do the Wrong Thing and not only fail to nominate the film for best picture, but choose a winner, in Driving Miss Daisy, whose questionable racial politics contrasted so starkly with Do the Right Thing’s brazenly critical treatment of race relations in the US.
And brazen it is. Complicated and cacophonous and complete in its chaos, Spike Lee's 1989 classic is a vivid slice of life, with an appropriately infuriating side-helping of shock.
1 - My Left Foot
Jim Sheridan’s bracingly honest debut steers a treacherous course between condescension and harshness, skilfully avoiding excesses of either. With the help of Daniel Day-Lewis and a sorely under-appreciated Brenda Fricker, he builds a picture of a painter and writer with cerebral palsy who is undominated by any of these constituent parts, more than any combination of them and capable of using all of himself to inflict an entire spectrum of human emotion on those around him.
Yes, method acting is probably needlessly pretentious and annoying. But maybe it was worth it here?
