1980s

  • Something Wild (1986)

    A sudden immersion into the screwball comedy genre might be the perfect challenge to the stagnant lifestyle of middle-class yuppie Charlie, as through his impromptu road trip with the freewheeling Lulu, Jonathan Demme sends Something Wild spinning off in hilarious and terrifying directions, drawing us into the orbit of characters trying to reconcile their own…

  • The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989)

    While The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover’s indictments of Thatcherism’s anti-intellectualism operate as a sharp political allegory in the vein of George Orwell, Peter Greenaway’s opulent Baroque aesthetic lifts it to another transcendent level altogether, transforming a restaurant into a gallery of vivid tableaux illustrating the horrific abuses of one gangster’s despicably…

  • Fitzcarraldo (1982)

    In Fitzcarraldo’s absurd dream of building an opera house in the Amazon jungle and his even stranger endeavour of hauling a giant steamship up a mountain, Werner Herzog centres him as a tragic figure in an epic fable of extraordinary ambition, fully consuming his mind with a megalomania that threatens the foundations of his own…

  • Blue Velvet (1986)

    Blue Velvet could be read as a twisted coming-of-age film in its discovery of worlds and minds that are not what they seem, though the depths that David Lynch plunges into humanity’s psychosexual awakening, disconcerting iconography, and bold colour palettes places it in a surreal class of its own, digging through the veneer of suburban…

  • Once Upon a Time in America (1984)

    In the dreamy, non-linear structure of Once Upon a Time in America’s epic narrative that covers the full scope of one Jewish gangster’s life in twentieth century Manhattan, Sergio Leone deftly blends each era within a single brew of nostalgia and shame, sifting through the mythology of a nation in the midst of squandering the…

  • Mon Oncle d’Amerique (1980)

    There is certainly some awe-inspiring beauty lost in an anthropological study of human nature as intensive as Mon Oncle d’Amerique, and yet in the formal cohesion of such unconventional motifs, collaged narrative threads, and punctuative editing, Alain Resnais devises a truly compelling piece of dense, intellectual poetry, dedicated to our most unifying quirks and habits.

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