The 1980s split cinema between blockbuster excess and quiet, searching art house work: the same decade that gave us The Empire Strikes Back also produced Paris, Texas and Cinema Paradiso. Hollywood chased franchises and spectacle while European and world cinema asked slower, harder questions. Macca's reviews cover the full range, so have a browse.
Rating: 2.5★
There are films that arrive out of nowhere, make an improbable fortune at the box office, and then spend the following decades generating a rather uncomfortable conversation about what, exactly, we were all laughing at. The Gods Must Be Crazy is one of those films. Released in South Africa in
Rating: 3.0★
There are films that arrive quietly and find their audience over time, and then there are films that kick the door in. Clive Barker's Hellraiser, released in 1987, belongs firmly in the second category. Adapted by Barker himself from his own 1986 novella The Hellbound Heart, the film
Rating: 3.0★
There is a particular kind of documentary that turns the camera not on its ostensible subject but on the people doing the looking, and Cannibal Tours (1988) is one of the more bracingly honest examples of the form. Directed by Australian filmmaker Dennis O'Rourke, the film accompanies a
Rating: 3.5★
There are films that arrive as events, reshaping the cultural landscape around them simply by existing, and Tim Burton's Batman from 1989 is one of the clearest examples of that phenomenon British and American cinema has ever produced. Before a single frame had been projected in a public
Rating: 3.0★
Claire Denis made Chocolat as her debut feature in 1988, drawing directly on her own experience of growing up in French colonial West Africa. The timing matters: by the late 1980s, the postcolonial reckoning in French cinema was gathering pace, and Denis arrived not as an outside observer but as
Rating: 4.0★
Euzhan Palcy's Sugar Cane Alley arrived in 1983 as something of a landmark, not just for Caribbean cinema but for French-language filmmaking more broadly. Set in Martinique during the early 1930s, the film draws on Joseph Zobel's 1950 autobiographical novel La Rue Cases-Nègres, a
Rating: 3.0★
There is a particular kind of horror film that earns its chills not from monsters in the traditional sense but from the unsettling suggestion that the world contains systems of belief and power that Western rationalism simply cannot account for. The Serpent and the Rainbow, released in 1988 by Universal
1980s
Abbas Kiarostami is one of those filmmakers whose reputation tends to precede him in a slightly intimidating way. Celebrated across European festival circuits and academic film culture from the late 1980s onward, the Iranian director built a body of work that consistently turned modest, everyday subjects into something that critics
Rating: 2.0★
H.P. Lovecraft spent much of his life being ignored, misunderstood, or quietly horrified by the modern world, which makes it fitting that his work has spent the decades since his death being adapted, reinterpreted, and gleefully mangled by filmmakers who clearly adore the source material even when they'
Genre Horror
★★½ — Nightmare City (1980)
Genre Action
★★★½ — A Better Tomorrow (1986)
Genre Music
Style Wars (1983)
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