When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences looked at 1985, it gave its Best Picture award to Out of Africa, which is basically a coffee-table book masquerading as a story. These are all better:
1. Brazil
Directed by Terry Gilliam
Written by Gilliam, Tom Stoppard, and Charles McKeown
Monty Python's 1984.
2. Crime Wave
Written and directed by John Paizs
Confusingly, there is another movie called Crimewave that also came out in 1985. That one, unfortunately, is not very good, even though Sam Raimi made it with some help from the Coen brothers. This one is great, though—an absurdist dark comedy whose place on the Weird Canada spectrum falls somewhere between Guy Maddin and The Kids in the Hall. (And indeed, Maddin and Paizs were in the Winnipeg Film Group at the same time, and Paizs went on to direct some Kids in the Hall sketches. It all ties together, man.)
3. Ran
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
Written by Kurosawa, Hideo Oguni, and Masato Ide
The story of King Lear predates the Bard, so it shouldn't seem that odd that the best film the play inspired doesn't include a single line of Shakespeare.
4. Pee-Wee's Big Adventure
Directed by Tim Burton
Written by Phil Hartman, Paul Reubens, and Michael Varhol
When I watched this in my teens, I thought it was pretty funny. Thirty years later I saw it again, and I realized it was a goddamn masterpiece.
5. Mix Up ou Meli-melo
Directed by Françoise Romand
A gloriously bizarre documentary—bizarre in content, bizarre in form—about what happened when two English families brought the wrong babies home from the hospital.
6. Vagabond
Written and directed by Agnès Varda
Not a simple celebration of a free spirit, and not a disdainful condemnation of a marginal life either.
7. After Hours
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Written by Joseph Minion
Other critics can weigh this picture's place in Scorsese's filmography. I'll just point out that it's the best movie Cheech and Chong were ever involved with.
8. Louie Bluie
Directed by Terry Zwigoff
This is a charming documentary about the bluesman, artist, and porn aficionado Howard Armstrong. It is also utterly fake: The comfortable living room that it seems to have been filmed in is actually a movie set, some of the people reminiscing with Armstrong barely know him, and the director had to persuade his subjects to play the early string-band songs he loved rather than the more complex music they preferred. I go back and forth on whether all that artifice is a flaw or simply another hidden dimension to the story.
9. Static
Directed by Mark Romanek
Written by Romanek and Keith Gordon
Before he was shooting videos for Bowie, Beck, and Johnny Cash, Romanek made this terrific indie flick about a man who believes he's built a machine that lets you peek into heaven.
10. Return to Oz
Directed by Walter Murch
Written by Murch and Gill Dennis
This didn't find an audience at first, probably because most people's expectation when hearing the phrase "sequel to The Wizard of Oz“ is not "freaky, scary movie that strongly implies Dorothy is insane." Fortunately, the picture eventually attracted the underground following it deserves.
Honorable mentions:
11. Mishima (Paul Schrader)
12. Fool for Love (Robert Altman)
13. The Gospel at Colonus (Kirk Browning)
14. Taipei Story (Edward Yang)
15. Come and See (Elem Klimov)
16. Prizzi's Honor (John Huston)
17. Fluke (Emily Breer)
18. Chain Letters (Mark Rappaport)
19. The Epic of Gilgamesh (Stephen Quay, Timothy Quay)
20. Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis)
Of the films of 1985 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in Mala Noche.
