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: 3.0★
There is something genuinely curious about the cultural longevity of Dirty Dancing. Released in the summer of 1987 by the now-defunct Vestron Pictures, it was made for a modest budget, shot quickly, and set in a world, the Catskills resort circuit of the early 1960s, that was already fading
Rating: 3.0★
By the mid-1980s, Hollywood had a well-documented habit of reducing Black actors to a narrow band of familiar types: the wisecracking sidekick, the menacing thug, the obedient servant. The blaxploitation wave of the early 1970s had come and gone, leaving behind a complicated legacy of films that, whatever
Rating: 4.0★
Few films have managed to straddle two genres as confidently as An American Werewolf in London. Released in the summer of 1981, John Landis's horror comedy arrived at a curious crossroads in mainstream cinema, when the slasher boom kicked off by Halloween and Friday the 13th was still
Rating: 3.5★
There are films that tell you a story, and then there are films that simply confront you with the world and leave you to make of it what you will. Koyaanisqatsi, released in 1982 and directed by Godfrey Reggio, belongs firmly to that second, far less populated category. The title
Rating: 4.0★
There are films that take a single, universally understood fear and squeeze every last drop of tension from it, and Robert Harmon's The Hitcher is one of the more impressive examples of that discipline to come out of the 1980s. The premise is stripped to the bone: a
Rating: 4.0★
There are films that define a genre, and then there are films that redefine what a genre is even capable of. David Cronenberg's The Fly, released in 1986, sits firmly in the second category. Loosely based on George Langelaan's 1957 short story (itself previously adapted into
Rating: 3.0★
George A. Romero's name is so thoroughly bound up with the living dead that any film of his sitting outside that tradition tends to get overlooked. Monkey Shines, released in 1988 through Orion Pictures, is a case in point: a psychological horror thriller adapted from Michael Stewart'
Rating: 3.0★
By the early 1980s, the American animation industry was in a peculiar state of drift. Disney, the dominant force for decades, had produced a string of pictures through the late seventies that felt safe and somewhat tired, and audiences were beginning to sense it. It was into this gap that
Rating: 3.0★
Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski made five films together between 1972 and 1987, and the story of that partnership has, by now, almost eclipsed the films themselves. Herzog's 1999 documentary My Best Fiend laid it all out in uncomfortable detail: the threats, the tantrums, the mutual fascination that
Rating: 3.5★
Sarah Maldoror occupies a singular position in the history of world cinema. Born in France to Guadeloupean parents, she studied filmmaking in Moscow in the late 1950s alongside figures who would go on to define Third Cinema, and she spent much of her career making films on the African continent,
Rating: 3.5★
The 5th of April 1941 was, by any measure, an ordinary Saturday in Belgrade. By the following morning, German, Italian and Hungarian forces had begun their invasion of Yugoslavia, and the country's brief, turbulent existence as a unified kingdom was effectively over. It is into that narrow sliver
Rating: 4.5★
There are films that arrive and are enjoyed, and there are films that arrive and rearrange the furniture permanently. Neo Tokyo gave a hint of what Japanese animation was quietly building towards, but it was Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira in 1988 that brought the whole argument to a head.
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