Plectro Picks: Best Films of the 1980's
by eronfalbo | created - 30 Mar 2014 | updated - 30 Mar 2014 | PublicFor more visit: http://plectropicksfilm.wordpress.com/1980s/ Last update: 30/03/2014 We’re not there yet. We’re virgins. We’re still courting our collective perfection. Meanwhile we’re producing more and more realistic and meaningful works. Films touch our hearts and minds via sound and vision and soon, surely, with taste and our very fingertips. While they are still just an analogy of the reality we dream, often they replace much worse fantasies we may conjure. In Plato’s Republic the artists would not be allowed entry. Until we get there, the artists paint the Republic we await. I work on this list since about when I was born. Films have inspired me profoundly and have been an important part of my upbringing. The world changes very fast and we find new ways of telling stories, but the stories are the same, so the better the medium, the better we convey education through story-telling. -Eron Falbo
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1. The Shining (1980)
R | 146 min | Drama, Horror
A family heads to an isolated hotel for the winter where a sinister presence influences the father into violence, while his psychic son sees horrific forebodings from both past and future.
Director: Stanley Kubrick | Stars: Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Danny Lloyd, Scatman Crothers
Votes: 1,105,990 | Gross: $44.02M
2. Excalibur (1981)
PG | 140 min | Adventure, Drama, Fantasy
Merlin the magician helps Arthur Pendragon unite the Britons around the Round Table of Camelot, even as dark forces conspire to tear it apart.
Director: John Boorman | Stars: Nigel Terry, Helen Mirren, Nicholas Clay, Cherie Lunghi
Votes: 67,139 | Gross: $34.97M
3. The Chosen (1981)
PG | 108 min | Drama
In 1944, in Brooklyn, two Jewish kids become friends. One is from a very conservative family, and the other is more liberal. The issues of importance of tradition, parental expectations and the formation of Israel cause constant friction.
Director: Jeremy Kagan | Stars: Maximilian Schell, Rod Steiger, Robby Benson, Barry Miller
Votes: 2,406
4. Quest for Fire (1981)
R | 100 min | Adventure, Drama
This story takes place in prehistoric time when three tribesmen search for a new fire source.
Director: Jean-Jacques Annaud | Stars: Everett McGill, Ron Perlman, Nicholas Kadi, Rae Dawn Chong
Votes: 24,110 | Gross: $20.96M
5. Gandhi (1982)
PG | 191 min | Biography, Drama, History
The life of the lawyer who became the famed leader of the Indian revolts against the British rule through his philosophy of nonviolent protest.
Director: Richard Attenborough | Stars: Ben Kingsley, John Gielgud, Rohini Hattangadi, Roshan Seth
Votes: 240,165 | Gross: $52.77M
6. The World According to Garp (1982)
R | 136 min | Comedy, Drama
A struggling young writer finds his life and work dominated by his unfaithful wife and his radical feminist mother, whose best-selling manifesto turns her into a cultural icon.
Director: George Roy Hill | Stars: Robin Williams, Mary Beth Hurt, Glenn Close, John Lithgow
Votes: 29,064 | Gross: $29.71M
7. Scarface (1983)
R | 170 min | Crime, Drama
In 1980 Miami, a determined Cuban immigrant takes over a drug cartel and succumbs to greed.
Director: Brian De Palma | Stars: Al Pacino, Michelle Pfeiffer, Steven Bauer, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio
Votes: 915,999 | Gross: $45.60M
8. Zelig (1983)
PG | 79 min | Comedy
"Documentary" about a man who can look and act like whoever he's around, and meets various famous people.
Director: Woody Allen | Stars: Woody Allen, Mia Farrow, Patrick Horgan, John Buckwalter
Votes: 44,158 | Gross: $11.80M
9. Amadeus (1984)
R | 160 min | Biography, Drama, Music
The life, success and troubles of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, as told by Antonio Salieri, the contemporaneous composer who was deeply jealous of Mozart's talent and claimed to have murdered him.
Director: Milos Forman | Stars: F. Murray Abraham, Tom Hulce, Elizabeth Berridge, Roy Dotrice
Votes: 427,799 | Gross: $51.97M
10. A Passage to India (1984)
PG | 164 min | Adventure, Drama, History
Cultural mistrust and false accusations doom a friendship in British colonial India between an Indian doctor, an Englishwoman engaged to marry a city magistrate, and an English educator.
Director: David Lean | Stars: Judy Davis, Victor Banerjee, Peggy Ashcroft, James Fox
Votes: 20,834 | Gross: $27.19M
11. The Razor's Edge (1984)
PG-13 | 128 min | Drama, Romance, War
He had everything and wanted nothing. He learned that he had nothing and wanted everything. He saved the world and then it shattered. The path to enlightenment is as sharp and narrow as a razor's edge.
Director: John Byrum | Stars: Bill Murray, Theresa Russell, Denholm Elliott, Catherine Hicks
Votes: 5,947 | Gross: $6.55M
12. After Hours (I) (1985)
R | 97 min | Comedy, Crime, Drama
An ordinary word processor has the worst night of his life after he agrees to visit a girl in Soho he met that evening at a coffee shop.
Director: Martin Scorsese | Stars: Griffin Dunne, Rosanna Arquette, Verna Bloom, Tommy Chong
Votes: 81,278 | Gross: $10.60M
13. The Name of the Rose (1986)
R | 130 min | Drama, Mystery, Thriller
An intellectually nonconformist friar investigates a series of mysterious deaths in an isolated abbey.
Director: Jean-Jacques Annaud | Stars: Sean Connery, Christian Slater, Helmut Qualtinger, Elya Baskin
Votes: 117,198 | Gross: $7.15M
14. Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)
PG-13 | 107 min | Comedy, Drama
Between two Thanksgivings two years apart, Hannah's husband falls in love with her sister Lee, while her hypochondriac ex-husband rekindles his relationship with her sister Holly.
Director: Woody Allen | Stars: Mia Farrow, Dianne Wiest, Michael Caine, Barbara Hershey
Votes: 76,756 | Gross: $40.08M
15. The Mosquito Coast (1986)
PG | 117 min | Adventure, Drama, Thriller
An inventor spurns his city life and moves his family into the jungles of Central America to make a utopia.
Director: Peter Weir | Stars: Harrison Ford, Helen Mirren, River Phoenix, Jadrien Steele
Votes: 31,184 | Gross: $14.30M
16. Full Metal Jacket (1987)
R | 116 min | Drama, War
A pragmatic U.S. Marine observes the dehumanizing effects the Vietnam War has on his fellow recruits from their brutal boot camp training to the bloody street fighting in Hue.
Director: Stanley Kubrick | Stars: Matthew Modine, R. Lee Ermey, Vincent D'Onofrio, Adam Baldwin
Votes: 790,085 | Gross: $46.36M
17. Cinema Paradiso (1988)
R | 174 min | Drama, Romance
A filmmaker recalls his childhood when falling in love with the pictures at the cinema of his home village and forms a deep friendship with the cinema's projectionist.
Director: Giuseppe Tornatore | Stars: Philippe Noiret, Enzo Cannavale, Antonella Attili, Isa Danieli
Votes: 282,761 | Gross: $11.99M
18. Dangerous Liaisons (1988)
R | 119 min | Drama, Romance
A scheming widow and her manipulative ex-lover make a bet regarding the corruption of a recently married woman.
Director: Stephen Frears | Stars: Glenn Close, John Malkovich, Michelle Pfeiffer, Swoosie Kurtz
Votes: 75,109 | Gross: $34.70M
19. Rain Man (1988)
R | 133 min | Drama
After a selfish L.A. yuppie learns his estranged father left a fortune to an autistic-savant brother in Ohio that he didn't know existed, he absconds with his brother and sets out across the country, hoping to gain a larger inheritance.
Director: Barry Levinson | Stars: Dustin Hoffman, Tom Cruise, Valeria Golino, Gerald R. Molen
Votes: 546,394 | Gross: $178.80M
20. Born on the Fourth of July (1989)
R | 145 min | Biography, Drama, War
The biography of Ron Kovic. Paralyzed in the Vietnam war, he becomes an anti-war and pro-human rights political activist after feeling betrayed by the country for which he fought.
Director: Oliver Stone | Stars: Tom Cruise, Bryan Larkin, Raymond J. Barry, Caroline Kava
Votes: 115,889 | Gross: $70.00M
21. Dead Poets Society (1989)
PG | 128 min | Comedy, Drama
Maverick teacher John Keating returns in 1959 to the prestigious New England boys' boarding school where he was once a star student, using poetry to embolden his pupils to new heights of self-expression.
Director: Peter Weir | Stars: Robin Williams, Robert Sean Leonard, Ethan Hawke, Josh Charles
Votes: 545,551 | Gross: $95.86M
22. Family Business (1989)
R | 110 min | Crime, Drama
An ex professor offers Adam $1,000,000 to "get" some plasma from a high tech company's lab. Adam asks his criminal grandpa for help. Can they convince Adam's now honest dad to join?
Director: Sidney Lumet | Stars: Sean Connery, Dustin Hoffman, Matthew Broderick, Rosanna DeSoto
Votes: 13,766 | Gross: $12.20M
23. Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989)
PG-13 | 104 min | Comedy, Drama
An ophthalmologist's mistress threatens to reveal their affair to his wife while a married documentary filmmaker is infatuated with another woman.
Director: Woody Allen | Stars: Martin Landau, Woody Allen, Bill Bernstein, Claire Bloom
Votes: 60,771 | Gross: $18.25M
24. Valmont (1989)
R | 137 min | Drama, Romance
France before 1789: When a widow hears that her lover is to marry her cousin's daughter, she asks the playboy Valmont to take the girl's virginity. But first she bets him, with her body as prize, to seduce a virtuous, young, married woman.
Director: Milos Forman | Stars: Colin Firth, Annette Bening, Meg Tilly, Fairuza Balk
Votes: 14,291 | Gross: $1.13M
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