1980sOrdinary People (1980) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Robert Redford's first film as director is a carefully observed drama about a family that cannot discuss a death, and it won Best Picture and Director over Raging…
1980sDriving Miss Daisy (1989) rates 5 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Two superb performances inside a film that covers twenty-five years of the American South and declines to examine any of it, in the year Do the Right…
1980sHenry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Made for around a hundred thousand dollars, shelved for four years over its rating, and still the film that other films about this subject…
1980sThe Return of the Living Dead (1985) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Dan O'Bannon invented the brain-eating zombie, the running zombie and the talking zombie in one film, and every one of those is now so…
1980sDay of the Dead (1985) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Romero's budget was cut in half and he rewrote it into a chamber piece about twelve people in a bunker who hate each other. The zombies…
1980sSilverado (1985) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Lawrence Kasdan made a Western in a decade that had stopped making them, assembled four leads before any of them were famous, and built it out of every convention…
1980sLonesome Dove (1989) rates 10 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Six and a half hours of television that does what almost no Western film has room for, which is to follow a cattle drive long enough that the…
1980sRain Man (1988) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Everybody remembers Hoffman and the Oscar, and the film belongs to Tom Cruise, who plays a genuinely unpleasant man for ninety minutes and earns the change without ever…
1980sParis, Texas (1984) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A man walks out of the desert after four years of silence and the film spends two hours working out why. The peep show scene at the end…
1980sIshtar (1987) rates 6 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Elaine May made a screwball comedy about two men with no talent, spent fifty-five million dollars doing it in the Sahara, and the name became shorthand for disaster before…
1980sNausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Miyazaki made it in about ten months for the equivalent of a million dollars, and its success paid for Studio Ghibli the following…
1980sRoad House (1989) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A philosophy graduate is hired to clean up a Missouri bar and ends up fighting a monster truck. It took five Razzie nominations, underperformed in cinemas, and became…
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