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The Best Films of the 1980s
The greatest films of the 1980s, from the end of New Hollywood to the rise of the modern blockbuster.
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The Belly of an Architect (1987)
Human ambition may strive for perfection in The Belly of an Architect, yet through Peter Greenaway’s formal orchestration of an obsessive artist’s mortal downfall, the imperfect present is woefully diminished between classical antiquity and a perpetually renewing future.
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Red Sorghum (1988)
Red Sorghum’s step back into modern Chinese history deserves the poetic treatment of a folk epic for Yimou Zhang, as this ancestral fable intimately bridges the distance between generations, and paints rural vitality and resistance in lush, expressive brushstrokes.
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The Home and the World (1984)
It is easy to be swept away by the vibrant, opulent melodrama of The Home and the World, as Satyajit Ray renders the clash of ideologies as both a national and profoundly private battle, entangling one impressionable housewife in a politically-charged affair.
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Cobra Verde (1987)
Cobra Verde may not be as tightly focused as Werner Herzog’s grander masterpieces, yet in this grotesque nightmare of one bandit’s mission to revive Western Africa’s slave trade, it brutally exposes the barbaric machinery of empires built on the systemic commodification of suffering.
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Jean de Florette & Manon of the Spring (1986)
Claude Berri does not set his Shakespearean tragedy of greed, scorn, and betrayal within historical halls of power, but underscores its meekness through the sun-dappled farms of 1910s France, witnessing the fateful, divine devastation wreaked upon two feuding families in Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring due to a pair of blocked springs.
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Intervista (1987)
The sad state of the modern Italian film industry does little to dampen the spirits of its artists in Intervista, as Federico Fellini whimsically blurs the lines between life and his own film production, and celebrates the timeless relationships formed behind the scenes.