BEST AMERICAN FILMS OF THE 1980S

The only survivor of the Nostromo, Ripley is discovered in deep sleep half a century later by a salvage ship. When she is taken back to Earth, she learns that a human colony was founded on the same planet where the aliens were first found. After contact with the colony is lost, she finds herself sent back to the planet along with a team of warriors bent on destroying the alien menace forever, and saving any survivors -- if any remain.

In the smog-choked dystopian Los Angeles of 2019, blade runner Rick Deckard is called out of retirement to terminate a quartet of replicants who have escaped to Earth seeking their creator for a way to extend their short life spans.

An alien is left behind on Earth and saved by the 10-year-old Elliot who decides to keep him hidden in his home. While a task force hunts for the extra-terrestrial, Elliot, his brother, and his little sister Gertie form an emotional bond with their new friend, and try to help him find his way home.

1988 film by Martin Scorsese

The life of boxer Jake LaMotta, whose violence and temper that led him to the top in the ring destroyed his life outside of it.

When Dr. Indiana Jones – the tweed-suited professor who just happens to be a celebrated archaeologist – is hired by the government to locate the legendary Ark of the Covenant, he finds himself up against the entire Nazi regime.

1985 film by Martin Scorsese

Disciplined Italian composer Antonio Salieri becomes consumed by jealousy and resentment towards the hedonistic and remarkably talented young Viennese composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

1980 film directed by Paul Schrader

Marion is a woman who has learned to shield herself from her emotions. She rents an apartment to work undisturbed on her new book, but by some acoustic anomaly she can hear all that is said in the next apartment in which a psychiatrist holds his office. When she hears a young woman tell that she finds it harder and harder to bear her life, Marion starts to reflect on her own life. After a series of events she comes to understand how her unemotional attitude towards the people around her affected them and herself.

Alex Linden is a psychiatrist living in Vienna who meets Milena Flaherty though a mutual friend. Though Alex is quite a bit older than Milena, he's attracted to her young, carefree spirit. Despite the fact that Milena is already married, their friendship quickly turns into a deeply passionate love affair that threatens to overtake them both. When Milena ends up in the hospital from an overdose, Alex is taken into custody by Inspector Netusil.

A veteran sergeant of World War I leads a squad in World War II, always in the company of the survivor Pvt. Griff, the writer Pvt. Zab, the Sicilian Pvt. Vinci and Pvt. Johnson, in Vichy French Africa, Sicily, D-Day at Omaha Beach, Belgium and France, and ending in a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia where they face the true horror of war.

Saxophone player Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker comes to New York in 1940 and is quickly noticed for his remarkable way of playing. He becomes a drug addict but his loving wife Chan tries to help him.

The film shows the educational programs and daily life of students from kindergarten through the 12th
grade at the Alabama School for the Blind. The School is organized around the effort to educate blind and
visually impaired students to be in charge of their own lives. Sequences in the film include mobility training,
braille instruction and orientation as well as traditional classroom subjects such as English, history, science
and music. Other sequences show psychological counseling sessions; vocational training; staff dealing with
student disciplinary problems; and the wide variety of recreational and athletic programs.

While recording sound effects for a slasher flick, Jack Terry stumbles upon a real-life horror: a car careening off a bridge and into a river. Jack jumps into the water and fishes out Sally from the car, but the other passenger is already dead — a governor intending to run for president. As Jack does some investigating of his tapes, and starts a perilous romance with Sally, he enters a tangled web of conspiracy that might leave him dead.

Clean-cut Jeffrey Beaumont realizes his hometown is not so normal when he discovers a human ear in a field, the investigation soon catapulting him toward a disturbed nightclub singer and a drug-addicted sadist.

In the midst of a searing Florida heat wave, a woman convinces her lover, a small-town lawyer, to murder her rich husband.

Paralyzed in the Vietnam war, Ron Kovic becomes an anti-war and pro-human rights political activist after feeling betrayed by the country he fought for.

Low-level bureaucrat Sam Lowry escapes the monotony of his day-to-day life through a recurring daydream of himself as a virtuous hero saving a beautiful damsel. Investigating a case that led to the wrongful arrest and eventual death of an innocent man instead of wanted terrorist Harry Tuttle, he meets the woman from his daydream, and in trying to help her gets caught in a web of mistaken identities, mindless bureaucracy and lies.

A hapless talent manager named Danny Rose, by helping a client, gets dragged into a love triangle involving the mob. His story is told in flashback, an anecdote shared amongst a group of comedians over lunch at New York's Carnegie Deli. Rose's one-man talent agency represents countless incompetent entertainers, including a one-legged tap dancer, and one slightly talented one: washed-up lounge singer Lou Canova, whose career is on the rebound.