The Shining (1980)

Stanley Kubrick's terrifying, mesmerising classic both adapts and adds to the Stephen King horror novel.

Jack Torrence (Jack Nicholson) and his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) spend the winter snowed in at the remote Overlook Hotel in Colorado. Their son, Danny (Danny Lloyd), has a special gift of telepathy – also known as shining. As isolation takes hold, Jack suffers a mental decline that is only accelerated by supernatural events.

Nicholson is superb in the lead role – both funny and convincingly insane.

The music is incredible. It's hugely atmospheric. The "tricycle" scenes around the lonely corridors are hypnotic. The psychological domestic drama is perfectly blended with a supernatural thriller. It's surreal and impressionistic, but with a strong narrative pull.

The Hunter (1980)

Steve McQueen’s final film before his death from cancer isn’t regarded as a classic, but it ought to be.

He plays a bounty hunter whose task it is to bring in dangerous criminals. The plot is enjoyably open-ended, with several threads interwoven. McQueen acts more than usual, which makes for an enjoyable watch.

There’s also a lot of humour and some genuinely exciting scenes. I especially liked the running joke about his inability to park a car.

Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

Tightly plotted and relentlessly entertaining, this was the second Star Wars film to be released (although it's placed fifth in the overall narrative sequence).

There's an excellent script full of highly quotable lines, and a lot of it is very funny, too. Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill are all at their best.

There’s romance (Han and Leia), adventure, mystery, excitement and peril. Plus an odd recurring theme of disfigurement.

The pacing is perfect. Director Irvin Kershner keeps things moving, but never at the expense of character development.

The Jazz Singer (1980)

The 1927 film The Jazz Singer starred Al Jolson and went down in history as the first full-length “talking” motion picture. This remake casts Neil Diamond in the Al Jolson role of the synagogue cantor whose father (Laurence Olivier) wants him to follow in the family tradition of strict religious observance. Neil, however, has other plans and wants to become a rock star. He takes off to L.A., abandoning his wife (Catlin Adams) and hooking up with music agent Molly (Lucie Arnaz).

It’s a fascinating film because of the way it presents Neil Diamond. Is he credible as a rock star? Not really, but he does have undeniable on-stage charisma. It's not a musical in the Singing in the Rain sense, but it does feature lots of him singing on stage.

My DVD is incredibly grainy and low-res. Probably the film has been remastered since, but the version I have is almost unwatchable.

Fame (1980)

Alan Parker’s engaging drama tells the story of a group of teenagers at the New York High School of Performing Arts. We follow them from the initial auditions through to their eventual graduation, getting to know their personalities and backstories through their social interactions as well as their musical, dancing and acting talents. 

It’s strongest for the first three quarters. The characters are developed well, and – unlike the spin-off TV show version – it doesn’t shy away from depicting the grittier aspects of their lives. The ending left me a little unsatisfied, though, and a few of the threads were left unresolved. 

It’s almost a musical, but not quite. On two occasions, spontaneous music and dancing breaks out (in the canteen and in the streets), but given that they are all performers it just about works within the “realist” framework. 

Performances are uniformly strong. Irene Cara (who sings the well-known theme tune) is Coco Hernandez, Lee Curreri is keyboard wizard Bruno Martelli, Barry Miller is troubled comedian Ralph Garci, Gene Anthony Ray is skilled-but-illiterate dancer Leroy Johnson, and Maureen Teefy is the “ordinary” Doris Finsecker who, inevitably, finds out that she's not so ordinary after all.

The Blues Brothers (1980)

Directed by John Landis, this is a remarkable blend of comedy, musical, road-trip saga, crime caper and love letter to Chicago. It’s rightly seen as a classic. There’s absolutely nothing else like it.

Brothers Jake (John Belushi) and Elwood (Dan Ackroyd) need to raise money to save an orphanage, so they plan to get their old band together – the Blues Brothers – to play a fundraising gig. The problem is that they are being pursued by the police, a country band, a bunch of Nazis and Jake’s angry girlfriend (Carrie Fisher). 

The action sequences are astonishing, with a huge number of police cars being trashed in the chase scenes. 

It’s especially notable for the song performances by jazz, soul and blues stars James Brown, Cab Calloway, Ray Charles, John Lee Hooker and Chaka Khan. There are also acting roles and brief cameos for John Candy, Frank Oz, Steven Spielberg and – bafflingly – Twiggy. 

It’s so good-natured and silly that it quickly wins you over. You end up rooting for these two daft men “on a mission from God” despite the inevitability that they are heading for disaster.

Raging Bull (1980)

Martin Scorsese directs Robert De Niro again. This time, De Niro plays real-life boxer Jake LaMotta in an adaptation of the latter’s 1970 memoir. It works as a biopic, tracing his career and personal life from the early 1940s to the mid-1960s. 

It’s beautifully shot in black and white. 

Joe Pesci is superb as LaMotta’s brother and trainer. Brilliantly, we never find out whether he’s having an affair with the boxer’s wife (Cathy Moriarty) or whether this is merely LaMotta’s jealousy and paranoia.

It’s brutally violent and every one of those punches looks like it really hurts. It’s excellently shot, in that sense. Being totally “method” about it, De Niro famously gained weight to depict LaMotta in his later years.

Gregory’s Girl (1980)

An absolutely lovely comedy directed by Bill Forsyth, the talent behind Local Hero and several other great films.

Gregory (John Gordon Sinclair) is a schoolboy who is part of the hopeless school football team in a small Scottish town. When the pretty, athletic Dorothy (Dee Hepburn) joins the team, he is instantly smitten. But although he doesn’t know it yet, it’s her Susan (the wonderful Clare Grogan) who truly likes him.

John Gordon Sinclair captures the awkwardness of being a teenager better than anyone else ever has. He’s hilarious in his good-natured but gawky, fumbling attempts to be with the girl he thinks he loves. He’s helped by his little sister Madeline (the remarkably composed Allison Forster), who is much more mature and worldly wise than he is.

Every character is so well drawn. The script is rich enough that each of Gregory’s friends is developed as a fully rounded individual. Plus, so many little details have the ring of truth about them that you can’t help recognising your own youth in these experiences.

There’s a gentle sweetness to this film that makes it timeless. You will never see anything more charming or romantic. And as it works round to its very satisfying conclusion, you realise you have been smiling for the full 90 minutes.

Airplane! (1980)

Spoof disaster film that’s extremely funny. As with others in this series (see also The Naked Gun), no joke is considered too silly or too childish to be worth making. And there are a lot of them, too – a relentless sequence of gags – so I was laughing almost continuously.

The “plot” is almost irrelevant (mostly it’s just an excuse for the jokes), but it details how veteran fighter pilot Ted Striker (Robert Hays) and his air-hostess girlfriend Elaine (Julie Hagerty) have to safely land a plane after the crew and passengers suffer food poisoning on a flight from Los Angeles to Chicago. To complicate matters, Striker is “troubled” by his war experiences, and has a “drink problem” (he can’t locate his mouth when he raises his glass). Plus, Elaine has just broken up with him and he’s trying to win her back.

Leslie Nielsen is easy to love as the hopeless Dr. Rumack. In fact, the entire cast is superb. There is so much rich comic detail that you could watch it again and again.

Flash Gordon (1980)

Highly entertaining adaptation of the comic-book hero’s exploits, wisely playing up the outlandish, cartoonish aspects of the story. The colours are super-bright, the costumes are wonderfully extravagant and everything is over-egged to the nth degree. It’s pure pantomime and it’s enormous fun. 

Sam J. Jones plays the hero as an almost blandly all-American beefcake football star. Melody Anderson is tremendous as Dale Arden, the travel agent who accompanies Flash to Mongo and falls in love with him. Topol is Dr. Hans Zarkov, the batty scientist who kidnaps the pair to investigate the extreme-weather peril Earth is enduring. Max von Sydow is perfect as evil Emperor Ming the Merciless, as is Ornella Muti as his sultry and traitorous daughter Princess Aura. Timothy Dalton (as Prince Barin) and Brian Blessed (as Prince Vultan) are the resistance leaders who join up to help Flash and his friends fight Ming’s empire. Blessed is a joy to watch – a constantly guffawing warrior “hawkman” kitted out in big wings. 

It’s made all the more thrilling and exciting by the soundtrack by Queen. The band contributed not only the famous theme tune, but also all of the incidental music as well. 

Peter Wyngarde plays the Darth Vader-like General Klytus. And Blue Peter presenter Peter Duncan has a cameo as a man who has to put his hand in a hole in a tree without being stung by a tree monster. 

Although it’s deliberately daft and cheesy, there’s an uplifting message in there about the power of humanity to display kindness and overcome the forces of evil.

A glorious celebration of silliness.

9 to 5 (1980)

Office-based comedy about sexism in the workplace. Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton are fairly entertaining in the main roles, playing against their “sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot” boss (Dabney Coleman).

It’s badly let down by a terrible series of fantasy sequences in which each of the women plots their oppressor’s demise. These scenarios aren’t funny and are actually a little creepy. They spoil the momentum and take you out of the story. The film recovers when the real plot begins, but only just: it still fails to ring true. If these were three ordinary, decent people (as the plot tries to suggest), they would never kidnap someone and keep them chained up as a prisoner for weeks.

9 to 5 makes some good points about gender inequality, but Working Girl (1988), which owes something of a debt to this film, did it so much better.

I was fairly disappointed, having expected a classic. Dolly Parton’s theme song is, by some distance, the best thing about the film.