By John H. Foote 22. ORDINARY PEOPLE (1980) Sorry Alan, but I believe 21 films are stronger than Ordinary People, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor and Best Adapted Screenplay. It was the debut film of Robert Redford as a director, adapted from a best-selling novel by Judith…
By John H. Foote 23. THE BIG CHILL (1983) After his success with Body Heat (1981), the electrifying film noir, Lawrence Kasdan turned his attentions to a very different group of people. Gathering for a funeral of one of their own who has taken his life, they are adults who were best friends during their…
By John H. Foote 24. GLORY (1989) There were three exceptional films that dealt with racial relations between African Americans and whites in 1989. Do the Right Thing was Spike Lee’s incendiary film about a riot started in the ghetto of Brooklyn, N.Y. on the hottest day of the year, while the Academy Award winning…
By Alan Hurst Her film career consisted of maybe just four major hits, a couple smaller gems, and unfortunately a few too many critical and box office misfires. But despite that, for a period beginning in the late sixties and lasting until the early eighties, Minnelli was a major movie star and one of the…
By John H. Foote 25. BLADE RUNNER (1982) “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark off the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time … like, tears in rain. Time … to … die.” – Roy…
By John H. Foote 26. AT CLOSE RANGE (1986) So many of the great films of the eighties were somehow lost in the shuffle of blockbusters and major studio films, they were relegated to minor releases and re-discovered on home video when they were released to that medium. Such a film was James Foley’s searing…
By John H. Foote 27. THE ELEPHANT MAN Based more from the real life of John Merrick (1862-1890) than the award winning and lucrative Broadway hit by Bernard Pomerance, this film was produced by the American company owned by Mel Brooks, Brooksfilms. The comic asked that his name be off or barely seen on posters…
By John H. Foote 28. BODY HEAT (1981) Miami is going through a heat wave in Body Heat and in every frame of this superb, superior film noir director-writer Lawrence Kasdan allows us to feel it, to sense the sweltering temperature as it rises. There seems to be a sheen on the characters, sweat stains…
By John H. Foote 29. MOSCOW ON THE HUDSON (1984) This gentle love story between two people, countries and their ways of life as they integrate into America was directed by Paul Mazursky, who gave audiences the superb An Unmarried Woman (1978) and eventually Enemies – A Love Story (1989). For me, Mazursky knocked it…
By John H. Foote 30. TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A. (1985) Fourteen years before the release of this exciting thriller, director William Friedkin won the Academy Award for his film The French Connection, the Academy Award winning Best Picture of 1971. Two years later he was back with the blockbuster horror film The Exorcist…