Christine (1983)

John Carpenter's superb adaptation of the classic Stephen King novel about a haunted car. It also functions as a teen drama.

It's scary, thanks to expert pacing and also Carpenter's ominous, exciting music. The film looks terrific, too, and is visually striking.

It's in love with America: a celebration of cars, cheerleaders, drive-ins, and rock 'n' roll.

As well as the horror element, it's a story about friendship and growing up. There's very strong characterisation. Keith Gordon plays Arnie Cunningham, the nerdy boy who buys the 1958 Plymouth Fury and is quickly possessed by her. John Stockwell plays his friend Dennis, and Alexandra Paul plays Leigh Cabot, a new girl at school that both Arnie and Dennis are drawn to. Harry Dean Stanton plays the investigating detective.

Sudden Impact (1983)

The fourth of five Dirty Harry films, this one was directed by Clint Eastwood himself. 

The story tells of a woman (Sondra Locke), who seeks revenge on the gang that raped her and her sister.

Eastwood and Locke have chemistry (they had been an item in real life), and Locke has a definite intensity. As usual with the Dirty Harry films, the villains are unfortunately one-dimensional and not convincing characters. The pleasure comes from watching how coolly Harry Callahan deals with them. 

Music by Lalo Schifrin provides additional atmosphere, and the cinematography by Bruce Surtees is spectacular.

Yentl (1983)

Musical romantic drama starring and directed by Barbra Streisand, based on a story by Isaac Bashevis Singer. 

Poland. 1904. Barbra wants to study Talmud but it’s forbidden for women. So she poses as a young man and joins a religious school to study in disguise. She befriends a fellow student called Avigdor (Mandy Patinkin), who she connects with both academically and emotionally. She falls in love with him, even though he believes she’s a boy. Plus, he’s engaged to marry a woman (Amy Irving). 

Unsurprisingly, the situation soon gets messy. There are comic elements, which escalate as the love triangle becomes increasingly complex. The ending disappoints because it seems to be a cop out. Why does Yentl have to choose between love and her studies? If she’s as forward-thinking, intelligent and passionately in love as the film suggests, can’t she find a way to have both? Also, although the film hints at Avigdor’s confused feelings as he becomes increasingly fond of his “male” study companion, it dodges having to deal with the homosexual sub-text. Likewise, when Avigdor’s fiance ends up falling in love with and actually marrying Yentl the film has to juggle lesbianism as well, but coyly backs away from the topic.

The most unusual aspect is the music. Unlike in a standard musical, most of the songs are simply overlaid on top of the action. Only rarely do you see them actually being sung, and even then it’s only Streisand who performs. Maybe it was deliberate, to keep the focus on Barbra, but preventing anyone else from singing serves to compound the fact that none of the other characters can express their inner feelings. As for the music itself, the soundtrack lacks a true “belter” or classic. Not one of the songs stays in your head afterwards.

The Man with Two Brains (1983)

Absolutely daft comedy with hints of cartoonish sci-fi and horror homage. 

Steve Martin plays a brilliant but naive brain surgeon with the unpronounceable name Dr. Michael Hfuhruhurr. Kathleen Turner is Dolores Benedict, who marries him for his money. The doctor meets an eccentric scientist (David Warner), who is keeping human brains alive and may have found a way to transplant them into other bodies. He then falls in love with one of the brains (voiced by Sissy Spacek) and ends up running off with it. 

It sounds ridiculous and it is – deliberately. There are some funny moments and a few scenes that fall flat. It’s not quite as sharp as The Jerk (1979) or Lonely Guy (1984), but Martin and Turner are both hugely appealing and watchable throughout.

Terms of Endearment (1983)

Melodrama with moments of comedy. 

Shirley MacLaine and Debra Winger play a mother and daughter who share an intense connection. We follow the evolution of that relationship, along with their couplings with Jack Nicholson and Jeff Daniels respectively. Then the plot takes a sideways turn and everything becomes a lot more serious. 

What makes this an absolute gem is the quality of the acting. All four leads are remarkable, but MacLaine and Winger are quite extraordinary. They convey such a strong sense of personality for their complex, fully rounded characters that it’s difficult to imagine they aren’t real people.

Trading Places (1983)

John Landis comedy starring Dan Aykroyd as Winthorpe, a wealthy commodities broker, and Eddie Murphy as Valentine, a poor street hustler. The social positions of these diametrically opposed individuals are switched because of a wager – hence the clever pun in the title. Valentine rises up in the firm while Winthorpe becomes a down-and-out. This cruel bet is staged by the Duke brothers (Ralph Bellamy and Don Ameche), who own the business and treat their employees as mere playthings. 

Denholm Elliott is the smart butler who is initially in on the scam, but who then helps Winthorpe and Valentine to outwit the Dukes. Jamie Lee Curtis is a “hooker with a heart of gold” character who helps Winthorpe when no one else will.

It turns briefly ludicrous when we get to the gorilla episode, but otherwise the plot plays out in a very satisfying way – until the ending. I was slightly disappointed that when our heroes get their own back, they merely enjoy their millions. They don’t do anything to reject the privilege, injustice and racism that determined their fortunes. Instead, Trading Places takes a lazier path and observes the usual 1980s film tropes in praise of upward mobility. 

That point aside, it’s sharp and funny. And all of the leads are superb.

Educating Rita (1983)

Hugely charming comedy-drama written by Willy Russell and directed by Lewis Gilbert. Rita a.k.a. Susan (Julie Walters) is a 26-year-old working-class Liverpudlian who begins an Open University course. Frank (Michael Caine) is her middle-aged tutor who feels jaded about his life and career, with a failing personal life and a drink problem. As they start to get to know each other by discussing literature, the pair begin to change each other in various ways. 

The storytelling is superb. It’s funny and poignant. The two leads are perfect in their roles and they have great chemistry together. When they are both on screen, there’s not a single misjudged moment, and every element either contributes to the development of the plot or deepens the extremely well-drawn characters.

The only aspect that seemed a little out of place was Maureen Lipman as Rita's Mahler-loving "bohemian" friend. She's funny, but seems almost a pantomime caricature. A pretentious student mentor would have better served the narrative.

There’s a superb semi-electronic soundtrack by David Hentschel, too.

It was interesting to see how much the respected film critic Robert Ebert got wrong about this film: "The movie stars Michael Caine as a British professor of literature and Julie Walters as the simple Cockney girl who comes to him for night-school lessons. She has problems: She is a working-class punk with an unimaginative husband." She's not a "Cockney" and she's not a "punk". 

Maybe it just doesn't translate to American audiences.

Silkwood (1983)

Superb drama about true-life events. 

Karen Silkwood (Meryl Streep) works at the Kerr-McGee Cimarron Fuel Fabrication Site in Oklahoma with her lover Drew (Kurt Russell) and their friend Dolly (Cher). Making fuel rods for nuclear reactors, she is exposed to radiation owing to the company cutting corners on safety standards. She alerts the Atomic Energy Commission and helps them investigate, with significant consequences. 

Although it’s a biographical story with political elements, it works especially well as a domestic narrative. I really like the scenes between Karen, Drew and Dolly, who all live together. The human drama of their developing relationships seems very real and I’d have been happy to watch an entire film focusing on that. The fact that there’s a whole additional narrative is just a bonus. 

I could finally see what all the fuss was about regarding Streep. She’s riveting and hugely charismatic. Kurt Russell is also strong, once again taking on a somewhat sulky role. Cher is terrific too: in her role as a downbeat, almost monosyllabic lesbian she’s the opposite of what you’d expect based on her glitzy showbiz profule.

Directed by Mike Nichols and with a screenplay by Nora Ephron, this could hardly fail to be enthralling. Sure enough, it ends up being one of the best films I’ve ever seen.

Heat and Dust (1983)

Strangely tepid Merchant Ivory adaptation of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Booker Prize-winning novel of 1975. 

In the 1980s, Anne (Julie Christie) travels from England to India to find out what happened to her great-aunt Olivia (Greta Scacchi) in the 1920s. The story splits so that we switch between both timelines. Olivia, we learn via extensive flashbacks, was married to a civil servant in the British Raj, Douglas Rivers (Christopher Cazenove), but caused scandal when she became involved with an Indian prince. 

The material is potentially interesting, but the treatment is leaden and stilted, despite the best efforts of Scacchi and Christie – who are the best thing about the film by some distance. The thread about civil unrest is not satisfactorily resolved. 

Slow and ponderous scenes lack vitality. Quite a few of them could have been trimmed or cut entirely. Ultimately, not a great deal happens and the drama that we do see is oddly underplayed. For example, we never get to find out how Douglas feels about his wife’s behaviour. In fact, we don't even learn how she feels about it herself. 

Maybe the novel is more exciting, but you’d never know it from sitting through these turgid 133 minutes.

Octopussy (1983)

“That’ll keep you in curry for a few weeks, won't it?” James Bond tells an Indian man, after handing him some money. This creaking Roger Moore film shows Bond badly in need of a re-think. As well as the usual racism and sexism, it’s largely played as a comic caper. Bond impersonates Tarzan at one point and dresses up as a circus clown for the dramatic bomb-defusing climax. Not only that, but in the countdown to detonation he wastes vital minutes applying the face paint. But even the “serious” parts are ludicrous. Bond drives a horse box with a fake “back end of a horse” that springs up to allow a small jet plane to unfold. He gets involved in an egg-related scam, with too much attention given to rare Faberge antiques. He travels across water in a fake plastic crocodile. He flies with Q into a hilltop palace using a Union Jack hot-air balloon. He dresses up in an ape costume. And so on.

On the plus side, Maude Adams is strong in the title role even if it’s unclear how much of a villain she really is. On the down side, Louis Jourdan is merely passable as an exiled Afghan prince and Steven Berkoff is utterly appalling as the cartoonish Soviet general Orlov.

You might hope this was it for Roger Moore as Bond, but he survived for one further film (A View to a Kill) – despite looking a little too old and weary for the role.

WarGames (1983)

Genuinely exciting thriller about a teenager (Matthew Broderick) who accidentally triggers the countdown to nuclear armageddon by hacking into US military computers. It’s fascinating to watch now, given how things have changed in terms of technology.

There are some unbelievable moments – hacker left alone in a room in a high-security military installation with access to a computer – but overall the story is surprisingly timely and plausible. In 2019 we are at the mercy of automated systems. And with Donald Trump as president, this sort of crisis seems all too possible.

It’s highly entertaining, with more of a nail-biting escalation than most James Bond films. The pacing is excellent too: it never lets up.

Apart from Matthew Broderick’s distinctly odd parents, the film is well cast. Ally Sheedy is appealing as Jennifer Mack, the hero’s school-chum-turned-girlfriend, and John Wood is effective as the eccentric, damaged Dr. Stephen Falken, who invented the WOPR (War Operation Plan Response) supercomputer.

There’s a happy ending, of course, but not before the moral – the futility of mutually assured destruction – has been firmly established.

Flashdance (1983)

Ludicrous. Alexandra lives in Pittsburgh. By day she works as a welder. By night she is an erotic dancer. But she has aspirations to be a ballet dancer. And her boss at the steel mill fancies her. Plot-wise, that’s about it. This is one of the most extreme examples of “film as extended pop video”. There’s minimal dialogue. One scene combines three different musical segments without any speaking at all. 

Being a true 1980s film, it’s full of references to social mobility. Jennifer Beals is OK as the pretty 18-year-old who dreams big and still looks immaculate after a long day of welding. The Giorgio Moroder soundtrack is a perfect window into the time. Irene Cara sings the main theme (“What a Feeling”), further linking this film to Fame, which it partly emulates (Irene Cara sang that theme too). 

But there’s something not quite right about Flashdance: the ethics are all over the place and the male lead (Michael Nouri) is merely adequate in an underdeveloped part. The sub-plot about the failed comedian goes nowhere. And the pivotal dance-academy audition scene at the end falls flat because you can tell it’s a body double – and not Beals – doing the dancing. It’s a bit of a turkey, really, and it makes Dirty Dancing look like a masterpiece. It grossed $201 million.

Local Hero (1983)

Directed by Bill Forsyth, this is one of the best films ever – a subtle, heartwarming comedy with great performances and a genuinely touching theme about protecting small communities and the environment.

“Mac” MacIntyre (Peter Riegert) is sent from Knox Oil and Gas in Houston, Texas, to the Scottish village of Ferness to acquire land on which to build an oil refinery. His possibly deranged boss (Burt Lancaster) is obsessed with astronomy and asks Mac to report back on activities in the sky. But when Mac begins to get to know locals such as hotel owner/accountant Gordon (Denis Lawson) and his wife Stella (Jennifer Black), his priorities start to change. 

The Highlands scenery looks beautiful and there are many hilarious moments. They work because the characters are drawn so well. There’s a richness that means you can watch it again and again. And like Danny (Peter Capaldi), it’s difficult not to fall in love with the mermaid-like marine researcher Marina (Jenny Seagrove).