When the Motion Picture Academy looked back at 1980, it gave its Best Picture award to Ordinary People, an after-school special with high production values. It isn't on my list. The year's most commercially successful movie was The Empire Strikes Back. It's one of the few Star Wars pictures that's actually pretty good—but it's not good enough for the list. The most historically significant film of the year was probably Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate, a longwinded western whose out-of-control budget and skimpy box office receipts brought the New Hollywood era to an end. It has a bad reputation, but I mostly like it, flaws and all. But I didn't put it on my list either.
1. Mon Oncle d'Amerique
Directed by Alain Resnais
Written by Jean Gruault
A severely determinist vision, bordering on paranoia, in which human choices are little more than the involuntary responses of mice in mazes. Its storylines are fictional but the figure at the center of the movie—the sociobiologist Henri Laborit—is real, putting the picture at the little-traveled intersection where documentaries meet science fiction.
2. Melvin and Howard
Directed by Jonathan Demme
Written by Bo Goldman
Demme's early movies tended toward eccentric Americana, and this one is the most eccentric and American of them all.
3. The Long Good Friday
Directed by John Mackenzie
Written by Barrie Keeffe
Bob Hoskins plays a gangster boss, and that really ought to be enough to get you to watch the picture right there.
4. UFOria
Written and directed by John Binder
Surely the only flying saucer movie in which key plot points turn on the protagonist's physical resemblance to Waylon Jennings.
5. The Stunt Man
Directed by Richard Rush
Written by Rush and Lawrence B. Marcus, from a novel by Paul Brodeur
I was blown away by this one when I saw it at age 18, and I renewed my affections for it by rewatching it every few years. Then I set it aside for awhile, pulled it out again in my thirties, and got the uncomfortable feeling that I'd outgrown it. Suddenly the lead character seemed like an asshole; his romance with the leading lady seemed implausible and contrived; the film-within-a-film seemed pretentious and inane. But I'll still put it here for old time's sake, and because Peter O'Toole and Allen Garfield are great in it, and because the movie is still entertaining even if it isn't all that profound. Besides, there's always the possibility that those flaws are supposed to be deliberate ironies. Maybe I should watch it again.
6. Bronco Billy
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Written by Dennis Hackin
If Mon Oncle d'Amerique's determinist worldview was too depressing for you, let Bronco Billy be the antidote. It's a celebration of individual freedom, extolling America as a place where people can jettison their old identities and reinvent themselves. As clear a statement of Eastwood's libertarian values as you'll find this side of The Outlaw Josey Wales.
7. Kagemusha
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
Written by Akira Kurosawa and Masato Ide
"When the original is gone, what will happen to the double?"
8. The Falls
Written and directed by Peter Greenaway
Imagine The Birds as a surrealist encyclopedia.
9. Raging Bull
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Written by Scorsese, Mardik Martin, Paul Schrader, and Robert De Niro, from a memoir by Jake LaMotta with Joseph Carter and Peter Savage
Not an easy movie to watch, but the De Niro and Pesci performances are enough to earn it a place on this list.
10. The Shining
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Written by Kubrick and Diane Johnson, from a novel by Stephen King
All work and no play makes jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes jack a dull boy. All wor—
Honorable mentions:
11. Bad Timing (Nicholas Roeg)
12. Atlantic City (Louis Malle)
13. Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers (Les Blank)
14. The Last Metro (François Truffaut)
15. Bye Bye Brazil (Carlos Diegues)
16. Airplane! (Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, Jerry Zucker)
17. Out of the Blue (Dennis Hopper)
18. The Ninth Configuration (William Peter Blatty)
19. Ashes to Ashes (David Mallet, David Bowie)
20. The Blues Brothers (John Landis)
Finally, let's have a shoutout to the final installment of Berlin Alexanderplatz. The miniseries as a whole may be 5 or 10 hours longer than it needs to be, but that 14th episode is sublime.
Of the films of 1980 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in Alligator.
