Image Credit: ©Warner Bros/Everett Collectionįuture Scandal patriarch/Skynet enabler Joe Morton is an extraterrestrial who crashes down on our big blue marble and lands in New York City. The resulting furor made it a hit, but don’t let the pearl-clutching brouhaha detract from the fact that it’s a genuinely sexy and disturbing movie that the couture by Jean-Paul Gaultier and the color-coded cinematography make this a visual feast and that it’s the most accessible of the British filmmaker’s work, and arguably his best work, period. Its envelope-pushing scenes caused the MPAA to threaten it with an “X” rating the distributors opted for no rating and then milked the controversy for all it was worth. It ends in tragedy, one which quickly turns Jacobean. He attracts the attention of the criminal’s wife (Helen Mirren). A boorish gangster (Michael Gambon) and his entourage frequent a chic French restaurant, which is also the favorite eatery of a intellectual gourmand (Alan Howard). D.F.Īrthouse aesthete and agent provocateur Peter Greenaway proved that you could shock audiences even as you tantalized them with some of the most gorgeous meals ever filmed - and that sex and violence should also be doled out piping hot, even if they’re ingredients in a dish best served cold. It also suggested that the fight wasn’t quite over in the present, either. It filled in a gap of little-known American history. Yet this roughhewn ensemble drama’s point about the workers-right movement couldn’t be more pertinent comin’ down the mountain during a decade (and presidential administration) that wasn’t exactly union-friendly. Sayles, cinematographer Haskell Wexler and his cast make you feel as if you’re watching a sepia-toned photograph come to life, with everyone from Chris Cooper’s catalytic organizer from the North to James Earl Jones’ dignified working man to Mary McDonnell’s widowed local appearing to have stepped out of the distant Appalachian past. An indie filmmaker long before the term was popular, the writer-director took a long, hard look back at the people, places and events that caused the stand-off between the overworked, underpaid miners and the brutal thugs hired by the Stone Mountain Coal Company to boil over. You can refer to what happened in the coal-mining country of West Virginia in 1920 as “The Battle of Matewan” or “The Matewan Massacre” - for John Sayles, it’s a ground-zero moment for American labor no matter what you call it. And all of these selections are ones we felt represented not just the decade they sprung from, but the very best that Eighties cinema had to offer.

Some are movies that might have flown under your radar entirely yet have not only stood the test of time, they’ve proven that they’re well worth yours. Some of these became instant cult classics and some were smaller films championed by few at the time, and have only recently - and belatedly - been rediscovered as true treasures. Some dominated the box office for weeks on end. So it wasn’t that hard, after many Zima-fueled nights of popping VHS tapes in and out of our video cassette recorders, to come up with a definitive ranked list of the 100 greatest movies of the 1980s. It’s never quite been the lost decade that people have claimed it was. Documentaries became formally innovative, socially insightful and more popular than ever. Several major directors brought their A game to the 1980s, a transfusion of fresh-blood filmmakers hit the scene with breakthrough works and bold debuts, and a handful of veteran international auteurs made late masterpieces.

Genres like science fiction and horror hit new heights. But that 10-year period minted a handful of Hall of Fame movie stars. It was a lull, a pressed pause button, a clearing of the throat in between arias.

For a long time, the Eighties were considered a bit of a cinematic dead zone stuck between the New Hollywood/modern blockbuster-inventing Seventies and the edgier, irony-heavy Indie Revolution Nineties. (Thank you for three of those things.) And if you went to the movies regularly, you were blessed with a steady diet of horny teens, killer robots, homesick extraterrestrials, raging bulls, road warriors, cop-and-crook team-ups, and more dystopian visions of the future than you could shake a time-traveling DeLorean at. It was the decade that gave us the Reagan administration, Rubik’s cubes, “The Reflex” and Run DMC.

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