The 1980s ran on excess, practical effects, and synth, and its movies never apologized. This tag collects reviews of 1980s cinema: the blockbusters, the B-movies, and the decade’s outsized influence on everything since.
1980sOctober 21 is Back to the Future Day, the date Marty McFly lands in 2015 in Part II. The occasion is a fan joke about hoverboards. The film behind it is a screenplay built so tight that almost every line…
1980sStripped to Kill (1987) rates 4 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Katt Shea's first film as director, made for Concorde under a brief requiring a fixed number of dance sequences, and she used the constraint to build something…
1980sThe New York Ripper (1982) rates 3 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Lucio Fulci made a giallo about a killer who murders women and quacks like a duck on the telephone. It was seized in Britain, refused certification…
1980sStreetwalkin' (1985) rates 3 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A Concorde Pictures production shot in New York in about three weeks, with Melissa Leo in her first lead role eight years before her career started, and a structure…
1980sSharky's Machine (1981) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Burt Reynolds directed himself in an Atlanta police thriller with a jazz score, a surveillance structure and a genuinely nasty streak, and it is the best film he…
1980sMs. 45 (1981) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Abel Ferrara made a rape-revenge film with a mute protagonist, almost no dialogue and a budget of around sixty thousand dollars, and Zoe Lund's performance is better than…
1980sNighthawks (1981) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Stallone and Billy Dee Williams are New York decoy cops assigned to an international terrorist, and Rutger Hauer is so much better than the film around him that he…
1980sAvenging Angel (1985) rates 3 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. The sequel recast its lead, aged the character to university student, and converted a squalid character piece into a revenge picture with a real estate conspiracy. It is…
1980sAngel (1984) rates 4 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. New World Pictures built a film around the tagline about a high school honour student who works Hollywood Boulevard at night, and the premise is the problem. What is…
1980sTimes Square (1980) rates 6 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Two teenage girls live rough in pre-cleanup Times Square and form a band, in a film that was recut against its director's wishes, had a relationship removed from…
1980sDo the Right Thing (1989) rates 10 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. One block in Bedford-Stuyvesant on the hottest day of the year, a pizzeria, a wall of photographs, and a film that refuses to tell the audience…
1980sStar Trek: The Next Generation rates 6 to 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A hundred and seventy-six episodes with a ceiling higher than almost any television of its era and a floor that includes the most embarrassing…
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