Films of 1984

1984 is my favorite movie year. I've always felt it was a strong contender for cinema's greatest year, but, of course, my love for the films of 1984 has a lot to do with the fact that I consumed a ton of them at a highly impressionable age, often over and over during my most formative years. There is also the fact that this is the only year in film history where the two films I consider the best of the year, Amadeus and Paris, Texas, won the Academy Award for Best Picture and the Palme d'Or at Cannes, respectively. Regardless, I think what 1984 represents in terms of cinematic trends and the variety of types of movies on offer is distinctive and special. In 2024, I set out to revisit the movies of 1984, screening or attending screenings of over 175 '84 films, many on, or close to, the 40th anniversary of their day of release, with as many as possible off of original 35mm release prints.

1984 was a prolific year for movie studios and independent filmmakers. It was a time when filmmaking turned away from the auteurist aesthetic of the late '60s and early '70s and made its way back to releasing and celebrating a range of pictures closer to what was on offer during Hollywood's Golden Age. The early-to-mid-'80s, in particular, gave us films about women that weren't limited to rape/revenge thrillers, films about African-Americans that weren't all blaxploitation, films that took the lives and emotions of teenagers seriously, films where LGBT characters weren't depicted as freaks, and films that explored many American subcultures from the inside. Not all of these movies succeed, and not all the trends I just identified reached their '80s high watermark in 1984. Still, I love this year's eclectic assortment of film styles and genres.

Of course, the move away from gritty, honest, angry-white-male-director-driven cinema is the main reason people trash the 1980s. Corporate-owned studios had re-found their footing with mainstream audiences and begun to make more populist, comforting, escapist fare, often relying on high-concept blockbusters that could be spun into a series of seemingly endless sequels. There's no denying that the 1980s trends in film production that people lament were real. After sitting through as many 1984 teen comedies, sex comedies, and teen sex comedies as I did in 2024, I can understand why professional critics of the day, who had to watch everything released in theaters, don't share my reverence for the year. However, the much-derided trends of any given era don't represent the entirety of cinema culture during that time, and this is perhaps most true of the 1980s.

In no way do I mean to trash the 1970s as some kind of erroneously heralded era in film. I love 1970s cinema for all the same reasons everyone else does. It was a decade that smashed the tired formulas of a stagnant mainstream Hollywood culture and dared to tell more raw, dark, personal, and honest types of stories. It's just that when you look back on the full range of that decade's cinematic output, it looks a little monochromatic in terms of the films that were readily available to a wide audience.

Similarly, the 1990s have always been heralded as the great era of indie movies, but that's because it was the decade when independent filmmaking became corporatized. The 1980s was the true golden age of the indies. In 1984 alone, we got the iconic independent films Stranger Than Paradise, Repo Man, The Terminator, The Brother from Another Planet, Stop Making Sense, Streetwise, Love Streams, Choose Me, This Is Spinal Tap, Old Enough, The Times of Harvey Milk, and Paris, Texas. If you went to film festivals, you also got to see 1985's Blood Simple!

But where 1984 truly shined the brightest was in its blockbusters. This may be the only year in which I not only loved every one of the top-10 box office hits, but the film I thought was the year's best movie won the Academy Award for Best Picture. We were still living in a time when "highbrow films" like Amadeus and The Killing Fields were mainstream hits, and "movie movies" like Ghostbusters and Beverly Hills Cop made even the stuffies critics jubilant with delight.

1984 was the year Sergio Leone released his final epic, Once Upon a Time in America, and James Cameron made his first sci-fi masterpiece, The Terminator. It was the year Prince reinvented the rock 'n' roll movie with Purple Rain, Jonathan Demme and Talking Heads made the greatest concert film of all time in Stop Making Sence, and Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, Harry Shearer, and Rob Reiner redefined the mockumentary format for all time with This is Spinal Tap. It was also the year Freddy Kruger first haunted our dreams in A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Kevin Bacon taught us all to dance in Footloose. Speaking of dancing, it was the year the Israeli tax shelter factory of Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus capitalized on a new fad so successfully that the two danceplotation pictures they made, Breakin' and Breakin' II: Electric Boogaloo, eclipsed '84's more substantive and authentic hip-hop movie, Beat Street.

1984 was the seminal year the MPAA introduced the PG-13 rating, Disney created Touchstone Pictures, and the Supreme Court decreed that home VCRs could be used to record TV shows and movies off broadcast television without violating copyright law. It was a year we saw a lot of babyfaced Sean Penn and Nicolas Cage and a whole lot of Mel Gibson when he was young, gorgeous, and (relatively) sane. 1984 saw Sally Field, Jessica Lange, and Sissy Spacek all playing women from America's heartland fighting big business and Regan-era government policy to keep their family farms intact in Places in the Heart, Country, and The River and while Andie MacDowell made her screen debut dubbed by Glenn Close in a film that got a dog nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay, Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes.

Daryl Hannah, Sarah Jessica Parker, Rae Dawn Chong, Chris Penn, Wallace Shawn, John Lithgow, and Geneviève Bujold seemed to pop up in everything. Sinfer/songwriter Kris Kristofferson starred in two films—Flashpoint and Songwriter—only singing in one. Dudley Moore starred in three films—Unfaithfully Yours, Best Defense, and Micki & Maude—only playing drunk in one. Paul Winfield demonstrated how an actor can simultaneously play comical, authoritative, warm, and deviant, all in the same performance in both Mike's Murder and The Terminator. Tom Hanks was well on his way to becoming the next obnoxiously overconfident '80s white guy actor of the moment with Bachelor Party until Splash came out and secured his fate as a beloved movie star for the next four decades. Eddie Murphy went from being a popular upstart comedian to the decade's biggest box-office draw with Beverly Hills Cop. And Harry Dean Stanton went from being a “that guy” actor in films like Red Dawn to being "fuckin' Harry Dean Stanton!" after appearing in Repo Man and Paris, Texas.

Even the bad movies of 1984 are memorable because they are soooo bad: films like Slapstick (of Another Kind) and Best Defense still hold top slots on most lists of worst comedies ever made. It was pretty much the final year of terrible teen comedies and sex comedies like Up The Creek, Making The Grade, Preppies, Where The Boys Are, The Woman In Red, Weekend Pass, Joy Of Sex, and Night Patrol, and saw a marked shift to movies that take sex and coming of age far more seriously, like The Flamingo Kid, Racing With The Moon, Old Enough, Reckless, No Small Affair, Firstborn, Cal, The Little Sister, Heartbreakers, Choose Me, and Love Letters. Some of these pictures have "not aged well," as the kids like to say, and have been rightly canceled, like Blame It on Rio. Some films are now labeled as deeply problematic but are still great movies and need to be seen in context, like Sixteen Candles. And some films straddle that line, like Revenge of the Nerds.

It was an amazing year for music movies, with Amadues, Stop Making Sence, Spinal Tap, Purple Rain, Songwriter, The Muppets Take Manhattan, Beat Street, and the Breakin' movies, and, like much of the decade, 1984 was an amazing year for sci-fi and fantasy films, with The Terminator, Repo Man, 2010: The Year We Make Contact, Threads, Starman, The Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai Across The 8th Dimension, The Brother From Another Planet, Star Trek Iii: The Search For Spock, Gremlins, Electric Dreams, Night Of The Comet, The Last Starfighter, Conan The Destroyer, The Neverending Story, Dreamscape, Dune, and Nineteen Eighty-Four itself.

Revisiting these films, I discovered many were better than I remembered them, like All of Me, Gremlins, Police Academy, Conan the Destroyer, Angel, and Hot Dog: The Movie, while others seemed like movies that ya really just had to be there for, like The Karate Kid, Streets of Fire, Against All Odds, Birdy, Grandview USA, Crimes of Passion, and The Ice Pirates. Many of the biggest films are every bit as great as people remember them, like Amadeus, Ghostbusters, The Killing Fields, A Passage To India, Romancing The Stone, and Indiana Jones and the Temple Of Doom, and many of the poorly reviewed and much maligned highbrow dramas are far far better than their reputations would have you believe, like Swing Shift, The River, The Natural, Under The Volcano, A Soldier's Story, The Bounty, Mrs. Soffel, and Mike's Murder.

After such a deep dive, I'm not sure 1984 can claim to be the greatest year of cinema, but it also made me question if any cinematic year can hold up to the rigorous scrutiny of revisiting so many of the good, bad, and ugly releases as opposed to just cherry-picking the greatest films of any given year. It was certainly a fun experiment!