1. The Shining (1980)
Even after multiple viewings, The Shining still frightens and haunts me. Jack Nicholson plays a struggling writer who takes a job as caretaker at a hotel in the mountains during the isolated winter months. When he moves his wife (Shelley Duvall) and young son (Danny Lloyd) in, things start to go very, very wrong. I've never been a fan of Kubrick, but I love this film immensely: the controlled directorial style allows the natural horrors of the situation to seep through. And given that the film is about a writer's paranoia, it's only right that we have ample time to become as convinced as he is that malign forces are at work in the labyrinthine hotel. Nicholson is splendid, both fearsome and touching, yet always entertaining, while Duvall is just superb as his strung-out wife, a good woman driven to the brink of breakdown by her terrifying husband while trying to do what she can to save her disturbed, 'shining' son. Almost every scene in this film is great, yet the set-pieces are never pretentious or artificial, and always move the story along effectively.
2. The Stunt Man (1980)
Okay, okay, okay, it's in my top ten! I admit it, this was not an easy choice to make. There were half a dozen movies which could have been here instead, all of which probably give me more guaranteed pleasure with each viewing. But The Stunt Man is a unique film, with unique pleasures. Richard Rush has had a halting, marginal career, but with this film, he did his bit: it's the work of a lifetime. Steve Railsback's harassed, paranoid Viet vet is put through his paces - and then some - by Peter O'Toole's dictatorial director, who is willing to use anyone and everyone - including leading lady Barbara Hershey - in his quest to make his war film. How the stunt man negotiates these supremely choppy and unenviable waters makes for a terrifically involving story, with no end of surprising and offbeat directorial coups. Bonus points for the dog licking its balls in the opening sequence, the night-time scene between Railsback and Hershey before the big final day, and especially Dominic Frontiere's rascally score, which gets endless mileage out of its witty theme tune.
3. The Great Muppet Caper (1981)
Jim Henson's artistic sensibility was perfectly suited to kids, his work full of classic entertainment - songs, silly voices, and sweet, sophisticated humour - while also having educational value and a gentle morality. The Muppet films were a very successful extension of the TV series, and The Great Muppet Caper is a really excellent movie for all ages. Kermit, Fozzie and Gonzo are reporters sent to London to cover the theft of fashionista Lady Holliday's diamond. She (Diana Rigg) is a grande dame par excellence, but unaware that her layabout brother (Charles Grodin) is the thief. And of course, Miss Piggy falls for Kermit... What seals the deal with this film is the terrific cluster of songs, composed by Joe Raposo in the style of classical American showbiz entertainment - among other things, this film deserves to be seen as a top movie musical. I loved it and watched it repeatedly when I was a kid, didn't see it for twenty years, and now, on seeing it again, realise that it has stood the test of time.
4. Stop Making Sense (1984)
I was a little surprised that this didn't make Andrew's top ten, but perhaps it was close? For me, this concert movie, directed by Jonathan Demme, and with not a little artistic input from David Byrne, is so comprehensively put together that it transcends its 'live' origins to create a series of abstract musical puzzles, perfectly ordered and paced, and totally satisfying, intellectually and musically. Byrne makes a great front man, the rest of the band plays tight - and really enjoy the music they create - and the makers work wonders with camera angles, lighting, and off-the-cuff filming. So strong a film it is, I would wager that you don't need to be a Talking Heads fan to enjoy it.
5. Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985)
Paul Schrader's best film, and one which deserved to do better - or even some - business. It's a biopic of Japan's famous post-war writer Yukio Mishima, told in three parallel strands - naturalistic recreation of the last day of his life, black and white account of his early years, and lush, multi-coloured recreations of scenes from some of his novels. This structure is fitting for someone who sought, his whole life, to unite his work and his desire for action, which, here, he finally does, in the 'harmony of pen and sword'. Helped by his reserved leading man Ken Ogata, Schrader presents Mishima as a multi-faceted and conflicted character - prolific author, celebrity, traditionalist, lover of Western culture, closeted homosexual and militarised, self-styled outcast. The visual surprises and glories are matched by Philip Glass's iconic score - those wonderfully ominous cells of music - and amazing production and costume design. It's one of the best films about the pleasure and pain of being a writer, and a very literate, unconventional biopic.
6. Come and See (1985)
This is a movie which has a mighty and awesome reputation, wholly deserved. Elem Klimov's final film (he felt he had nothing more to say after having made it) is an account of the Nazi stranglehold on Belarus in the Second World War. This terrible period is seen through the eyes of an adolescent boy, Florya (Alexei Kravchenko, billed as A. Kravchenko), who has run away to join the guerrillas and gets an abrupt, and unforgettable, lesson in the art of war. Klimov anchors the movie in a firm reality, then embellishes it with surrealistic touches which increase our identification with Florya's experience - the high-pitched whistle on the soundtrack when the boy is rendered temporarily deaf by bombing, the toppling trees, the wade through the swamp, and the whole second half of the film, which, with its extended Nazi atrocities, is as terrifying and devastating as movies can get. But it's ironic that when a movie actually earns those overused epithets, it does so by showing how futile such descriptions are; Come and See just needs to be seen. The only thing about it which will lift your spirits is the excellence of the moviemaking itself.
7. Crazy Love (1987)
Young Belgian writer-director Dominique Deruddere made a splash with this, his first feature film. Adapted from writings by Charles Bukowski, it's the three-part story of a young man's coming of age, and is a movie which shines a pallid light on the gulf between the ideal of love and the messy, real thing. As a young boy, Harry Voss (Geert Hunaerts) falls for a blonde beauty on the silver screen and is then traumatised by his older friend's initiation into the world of dating and, ahem, girls. A few years later, and suffering from a monstrous case of acne, Harry (now played by Josse de Pauw) finds himself the outcast at the end-of-year disco, but desperate to make an impression on the school sweetheart. Lastly, as an alcoholic adult, Harry must confront his demons when he finds the beautifully preserved corpse of what is probably his ideal woman. By turns funny, farcical, macabre and downright tragic, Crazy Love is a striking and profound movie, a triumph of Belgian cinema, which rides its disturbing sexual and emotional shenanigans on a wave of heartfelt compassion.
8. Moonstruck (1987)
Whatever happened to the romantic comedy genre seems to stem from when they became commonly known as romcoms. Because these days, I never see a good one. Notting Hill is about the best we've had, and it's sweet, silly and, I suppose, romantic, but back in 1987 we had Moonstruck, and thank goodness we still have it today. Plot is simple: lonesome Italian-American widow Loretta (Cher) gets engaged to mamma's boy Johnny (Danny Aiello) and then promptly falls for his estranged brother Ronny (Nicolas Cage). What's a girl to do? Well, it would be helpful to notice the big full moon hovering over Brooklyn, which seems to be setting off Loretta's whole family on various romantic escapades, while Loretta herself has 'those ugly greys' removed from her hair, gets dolled up and goes to La Bohème at the Met with the man she's trying not to fall in love with! Moonstruck, superbly written by John Patrick Shanley and effervescently directed by Norman Jewison, is a magical movie, chock-full of witty lines, demonstrative performances and affairs of the heart. It's a movie imbued with the spirit of the commedia all'Italiana, and Cher proves herself an actress worthy of the status of Sophia Loren.
9. Nuovo Cinema Paradiso (1988)
Writer-director Giuseppe Tornatore had made only one film before this catapulted him to international attention. It's easy to see why it lapped up audiences: in its tale of the friendship across the years between a young boy and a cinema projectionist at a small cinema in Sicily, it tells a simple, touching story, while also paying tribute to the very act of movie-going. But Nuovo Cinema Paradiso strikes a deeper chord than mere adulation: it builds its story on a bedrock of disappointment, missed opportunities, loss and regret, which goes a long way to counterbalancing the sentimentality for the provincial movie house of the title, a balance sustained by Ennio and Andrea Morricone's luscious but aching orchestral score. It's important to note that these qualities come through much louder and clearer in the director's cut, which flopped upon initial release, was edited down into the Oscar-winning extravaganza everybody knows, and was then re-released to more acclaim in the '90s. There are charming and effective performances from the three actors who play central character Totò: Salvatore Cascio as the young boy, Marco Leonardi as the lovelorn youth, and Jacques Perrin as the celebrated, but unhappy filmmaker in middle age; while Philippe Noiret plays the cantankerous but always loveable projectionist, whose wisdom might be summed up as 'cruel to be kind'.
10. Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989)
Woody Allen was, for me, the filmmaker of the decade, with pretty much all of his films from this period being a cut above the norm. Broadway Danny Rose, The Purple Rose of Cairo and Hannah and Her Sisters are all yapping at the coat-tails (or pasta-covered table cloth) of my '80s top ten; Crimes and Misdemeanors trumps them all and remains for me, with Annie Hall, Allen's best work. It's a film which takes on a weighty issue - how to have morals in a godless universe - and tackles it through two stories in one: a dark and dramatic tale of a philandering opthamologist (Martin Landau) who is toying with having his mistress (Anjelica Huston) bumped off and a witty love triangle involving Woody Allen's hapless documentary filmmaker, Mia Farrow's sweet and pragmatic production manager and Alan Alda's pompous television magnate. Through juggling these narrative strands, Allen creates a fully-rounded portrait of life's ups and downs, and presides over uniformly excellent performances from his extensive cast. And, given that his concentration on the bourgeoisie has attracted some criticism over the years, this film, like the later Match Point, uses its privileged characters in order to comment on the corrupting nature of power and money, and the necessary endurance of the opposites.
Ten performances of the decade
Men:
A. Kravchenko in Come and See (1985)
Jeff Bridges in Jagged Edge (1985)
Jon Voight in Runaway Train (1985)
Sean Connery in The Name of the Rose (1986)
James Woods in Salvador (1986)
Women:
Shelley Duvall in The Shining (1980)
Diane Keaton in Reds (1981)
Meryl Streep in Silkwood (1983)
Sigourney Weaver in Aliens (1986)
Cher in Moonstruck (1987)
I didn't see it at the theater because I was one of the seven people in the country who chose to go see Grindhouse that weekend instead. The movie has a few effective suspense scenes, but for the most part it wasn't very good. It's premise is obviously derived from Rear Window (1954) – a housebound individual starts peeping on his neighbors and suspects that one of them is a murderer – but it felt like the filmmakers simply had no understanding of what made Hitchcock's version so effective and wonderful. Every change they made to the Rear Window template was a step in the wrong direction, betraying the central conceits of the story. So, I thought I'd jot down a few musings I've had about where Disturbia went wrong in its translation of Hitch...
