Fixed / updated on 7.19.26, 7:45 am: I’ve half-hated a huge amount of films released in 1984, including several of the year’s most popular — Beverly Hills Cop (blah), Ghostbusters (loathed the absurd, over-produced ending), Gremlins (sorry, Joe!), The Karate Kid, Police Academy, Footloose (loathed it from the get-go) and Romancing The Stone. They all strike me as faint, quarter-inch-deep formulaic flotsam.
I don’t even feel lasting passion (i.e., have never even thought about re-watching over the last 35 years) for some of the worthy ones — Amadeus, The Natural, A Soldier’s Story, Once Upon A Time in America, The Pope of Greenwich Village, Purple Rain, The Bostonians, Iceman, Moscow on the Hudson, Falling in Love, The Hotel New Hampshire (10). All are good or at the very least decent, but with little in the way of lingering sparks in our diminished here-and-now.
By HE’s measuring stick here, in this order, are 1984’s top seven…canonical cred, unmistakable resonance, the most in the way of follow-through current and zero blemishes:
1. Alex Cox‘s Repo Man
2. Stephen Frears‘ The Hit
3. James Bridges‘ Mike’s Murder
4. Robert Benton‘s Places in the Heart
5. James Cameron‘s The Terminator
6. Rob Epstein‘s The Times of Harvey Milk
7. Woody Allen‘s Broadway Danny Rose
Here are HE’s #8 through #14:
8. Joel & Ethan Coen‘s Blood Simple
9. Roger Donaldson‘s The Bounty
10. Robert Bresson‘s L’Argent
11. John Milius‘s Red Dawn
12. Carl Reiner‘s All Of Me
13. Roland Joffe‘s The Killing Fields
14. David Lean‘s A Passage to India