Helen Mirren as Georgina Spica wearing red while sitting at the table in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover.Image via Miramax
By
Luc Haasbroek
Published 52 minutes ago
Luc Haasbroek is a writer and videographer from Durban, South Africa. He has been writing professionally about pop culture for eight years. Luc's areas of interest are broad: he's just as passionate about psychology and history as he is about movies and TV. He's especially drawn to the places where these topics overlap.
Luc is also an avid producer of video essays and looks forward to expanding his writing career. When not writing, he can be found hiking, playing Dungeons & Dragons, hanging out with his cats, and doing deep dives on whatever topic happens to have captured his interest that week.
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Despite the somewhat infamous reputation they have when it comes to cinema, the 1980s left behind more than blockbusters and franchises. While the mainstream was dominated by corporate filmmaking, resulting in a noticeable decline in quality compared to the absolute boom of the 1970s, the '80s were also a decade of strange gems and striking international films.
With this in mind, this list looks at some great films from the '80s that are not that popular today despite aging gracefully, which is quite a feat, considering how fast audiences' sensibilities change in today's world. While the titles below are not that obscure, many movie buffs might still not have seen them yet, much less the average moviegoer. They run the gamut from arthouse drama to gritty crime thrillers, each offering something to justify a viewing.
10 ‘To Live and Die in L.A.’ (1985)
A shot of Los Angeles at night from To Live and Die in L.A.Image via United Artists
"Chance isn’t taking any prisoners." William Friedkin’s crime thriller To Live and Die in L.A. feels like the sinister sibling of Miami Vice, but far grittier and more psychologically jagged. In it, Secret Service agent Richard Chance (William Petersen) becomes obsessed with catching master counterfeiter Rick Masters (Willem Dafoe) after a fellow agent is killed. As Chance grows more reckless, the line between cop and criminal dissolves, culminating in one of the boldest, bleakest endings of any '80s thriller.
The movie has a raw immediacy that plays even better today, which comes through in the tense, electronic score by Wang Chung, the frenetic, handheld camerawork, and the phenomenal car chases (one of the director's specialties). The themes have aged well, too. Indeed, the film's portrait of law-enforcement burnout, moral corrosion, and the seduction of risk feels eerily contemporary. Fans of gritty, ambiguous narratives and propulsive stuntwork ought to give it a try.
9 ‘The Last Emperor’ (1987)
Young Emperor Puyi looking at his soldiers standing in a square in The Last Emperor - 1987Image via Columbia Pictures
"I was the Son of Heaven. How can I be a criminal?" This epic biographical drama chronicles the life of Pu Yi (John Lone), the final emperor of China, from his coronation as a toddler to his twilight years as a humble gardener after the Cultural Revolution. While acclaimed at release and winner of nine Oscars, it remains strangely under-discussed today, overshadowed by flashier '80s prestige films, yet its beauty has only intensified with time.
Shot on location inside Beijing’s Forbidden City, the film boasts vast compositions, sumptuous costumes, and a delicate, evocative score. It's just as rich in terms of its ideas. At its core is Pu Yi’s lifelong struggle to understand his place in a world that constantly reshapes him, from puppet ruler to prisoner to anonymous citizen. Director Bernardo Bertolucci brings complexity and visual grandeur to this character study, making the subject feel like a real person rather than a figure in a history book.
8 ‘Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters’ (1985)
people standing in formation in front of a hut in MishimaImage via Warner Bros.
"Perfect purity is possible if you turn your life into a line of poetry written with a splash of blood." This daring biopic from Taxi Driver screenwriter Paul Schrader remains one of the decade’s most daring artistic achievements. Interweaving episodes from author turned radical Yukio Mishima’s (Ken Ogata) childhood, his final day, and stylized dramatizations of three of his novels, the movie constructs a mosaic portrait rather than a conventional biography.
The plot, such as it is, traces Mishima’s lifelong obsession with beauty, discipline, masculinity, and death, culminating in his notorious ritual suicide. Along the way, Schrader uses bold, color-coded sets, theatrical mise-en-scène, and a soaring Philip Glass score to blur reality and imagination. The result is an intensely controlled yet emotionally volatile work that feels years ahead of its time. It focuses on a single person, yet also makes a broader statement on postwar Japan.
7 ‘The Long Good Friday’ (1980)
Bob Hoskins as Harold in The Long Good FridayImage via HandMade Films
"I’m not a politician. I’m a businessman… and this is personal." The Long Good Friday stars Bob Hoskins in one of the all-time great gangster performances, playing London crime boss Harold Shand at the height of his power. We follow Harold over a single Easter weekend as his criminal empire begins to unravel through a series of bombings, betrayals, and shifting political forces. What begins as a confident portrait of corruption evolves into a tense character study of a man discovering that he no longer understands the world he controls.
Alongside Hoskin, Helen Mirren provides a sharp, elegant counterpoint as Harold's partner, mediating between diplomacy and brutality. The story builds up to a powerful ending, an extended, wordless close-up that communicates panic, rage, and existential despair all at once. The Long Good Friday is an entertaining British gangster movie, but its message is surprisingly smart too. The depiction of globalization, gentrification, and the fading of an old way of life hits pretty hard.
6 ‘Manhunter’ (1986)
"Have you ever seen blood in the moonlight? It looks quite black." Before The Silence of the Lambs, there was Manhunter, Michael Mann’s sleek, icy adaptation of Thomas Harris' novel Red Dragon. While not on the level of Jonathan Demme's film, it still packs a hell of a punch. William Petersen leads the cast yet again, this time playing FBI profiler Will Graham, who comes out of retirement to track a serial killer known as "The Tooth Fairy." Graham must face not only the killer but also the imprisoned Hannibal Lecktor (Brian Cox), whose psychological influence nearly destroyed him in the past.
The movie broke ground by placing forensic science front and center, significantly influencing so many crime movies and shows to follow, most notably CSI. The grim aesthetic and themes can also be seen in numerous subsequent movies, for example, David Fincher's Se7en. All in all, Manhunter is a compelling, tense, stylish, and emotionally rich procedural, certainly worth checking out for fans of the genre.
5 ‘The Killing of America’ (1981)
Image via Towa Productions
"We have become a society where violence is a form of entertainment." Sheldon Renan and Leonard Schrader’s documentary The Killing of America is possibly the most shocking film on this list. It's a nonfiction chronicle of escalating violence in the United States from the 1960s through the early ’80s. Structured as a montage of real news footage, the film traces a cultural descent marked by political assassinations, serial killers, civic unrest, and everyday brutality. There is no narrator offering comfort, nor any optimistic slant to soften the blow.
The documentary simply presents the images and statistics and lets the horror accumulate. Though controversial and difficult to watch, The Killing of America has aged into a chilling time capsule that remains disturbingly relevant. The film’s thesis — a society numb to violence is a society in crisis — lands even harder today. Critics have accused the movie of being exploitative, but its approach influenced a significant subsection of documentary filmmaking.
4 ‘The Purple Rose of Cairo’ (1985)
Dianne Wiest as Emma in The Purple Rose of Cairo.image via Orion
"I just met a wonderful new man. He’s fictional… but you can’t have everything." Mia Farrow leads this one as Cecilia, a Depression-era waitress whose bleak life is transformed when her favorite movie character, Tom Baxter (Jeff Daniels), literally steps off the screen and into the real world. It's a romantic fantasy laced with melancholy: Cecilia is torn between Tom, an idealized figure who doesn’t fully belong in reality, and the actor who plays him, who wants to preserve his film career.
The movie uses its central conceit, characters crossing between fiction and reality, to examine the power of movies as both escape and illusion. It fits a lot of story into just 82 minutes. Though whimsical on the surface, The Purple Rose of Cairo is really bittersweet and oddly profound. Its final moments, in which Cecilia retreats into the warm glow of the cinema, will resonate with any cinephile.
3 ‘Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence’ (1983)
David Bowie in Merry Christmas, Mr. LawrenceImage via Shochiku Fuji
"There are times when victory is very hard to take." David Bowie turns in a strong performance in this war drama, directed by In the Realm of the Senses' Nagisa Oshima. He is Jack Celliers, a British officer held in a Japanese POW camp during World War II. The crux of the story is his complicated dynamic with camp commander Yonoi (Ryuichi Sakamoto, who also handled the score). Meanwhile, diplomat John Lawrence (Tom Conti) attempts to mediate the deep cultural misunderstandings between prisoners and captors.
Oshima builds these relationships into a haunting exploration of cultural conflict, striking a unique balance between stark realism and a few surreal, emotional moments. Casting Bowie was an inspired choice. Here, the musician radiates an almost otherworldly charisma, making his character way more interesting than he would have been simply on the page. The script calls on him to do a lot, and he delivers every time.
2 ‘Rouge’ (1987)
Image via Golden Harvest
"If love lasts long enough, it becomes a ghost that never leaves." This romantic ghost drama from Hong Kong director Stanley Kwan moves fluidly between 1930s Hong Kong and the 1980s, following the ghost of a courtesan named Fleur (Anita Mui) who returns to the modern world in search of her lost lover (Leslie Cheung), with whom she once made a suicide pact. When the lover fails to appear in the afterlife, Fleur begins investigating what became of him, aided by a sympathetic contemporary couple.
Rouge is poetic and visually lush, boasting carefully composed frames and colors that pop. In the process, it juxtaposes the glamorous myth of old Hong Kong with the disenchanted realities of the present, making for a subtle political statement that rings even more true now. For all these reasons, Rouge is considered a major work of Hong Kong's Second New Wave, and it's well worth checking out for viewers who enjoy melancholy melodramas.
1 ‘The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover’ (1989)
Image via Palace Pictures
"I didn’t come here for food. I came here for you." Peter Greenaway’s sumptuous, shocking allegory, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, is one of the most audacious films of the '80s. Set almost entirely inside a lavish London restaurant, it follows the abused wife (Helen Mirren) of a violent gangster (Michael Gambon) as she engages in a secret affair with another diner (Alan Howard), aided by the restaurant staff. The violence, decadence, and moral rot of the characters reflect the political climate of Thatcher-era Britain.
The protagonists might be spiritually starved, but the film itself is a visual feast: color-coded rooms, theatrical tableaus, and lush costumes create a sense of heightened reality. Initially too strange and confrontational for mainstream audiences, the movie is now held in high regard for its mix of raw emotion, grotesque imagery, and painterly beauty. Plus, those who only really know Gambon from his role as the wise, benevolent Dumbledore might enjoy seeing him as an oafish crime boss.
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover
R
Crime
Drama
Release Date
October 13, 1989
Cast
Michael Gambon, Richard Bohringer, Helen Mirren, Alan Howard, Tim Roth, Ciarán Hinds, Liz Smith, Gary Olsen, Ewan Stewart, Roger Ashton-Griffiths, Ian Dury, Diane Langton, Prudence Oliver, Ron Cook, Emer Gillespie, Janet Henfrey, Willie Ross, Roger Lloyd Pack, Alex Kingston, Bob Goody, Paul Russell, Arnie Breeveld, Tony Alleff, Ian Sears, Peter Rush
Runtime
124 minutes
Writers
Peter Greenaway
Genres
Crime, Drama
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