Spielberg explores World War II through the eyes of a young British boy (Christian Bale) separated from his parents in Shanghai and forced to live in a Japanese internment camp. For a director who often celebrates innocence (and sometimes wallows in it), it’s nice to see a darker examination of the subject. In Empire of the Sun, innocence isn’t just lost. It’s almost shattered.
The public will never let director Joel Schumacher live down his Batman movies, but let’s not forget that before there were nipples on the Batsuit, there was The Lost Boys. A divorced mother brings her two sons to a coastal California town to live with their grandfather and make a new life for themselves. There’s just one problem. The whole town is prey for a gang of vampires!
Rob Reiner (This Is Spinal Tap, The Princess Bride) adapts this dark coming-of-age tale from Stephen King, about a band of four boys who embark on a weekend journey to find the body of a missing teenager. Stand By Me is the best film of Reiner’s career, and the best film adaptation of King’s work. It’s a moving, hauntingly nostalgic piece, bolstered with healthy doses of good humor and some of the best adolescent performances ever put to film.
Writer/director John Hughes had more box office hits than you can shake a stick at, and while many of them were fun and irreverent fare (like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off or Weird Science), one sticks out above the crowd — his crowning achievement: The Breakfast Club. It’s a low-concept, small-scale production — practically a filmed stage play — about five disparate teenagers who suffer Saturday detention together. There’s the jock (Emilio Estevez), the princess (Molly Ringwald), the nerd (Anthony Michael Hall), the bad boy (Judd Nelson), and the weirdo (Ally Sheedy) — all kids who would never spend one minute of time together under any other circumstances. But tossed together in their school library under the watch of their vindictive principal (Paul Gleason), they are forced to get to know one another.
Robert Redford directs this adaptation of Judith Guest’s novel, about a family reeling from the accidental death of the eldest child. Unlike so many dramas, it’s what you don’t see and what isn’t said that makes Ordinary People such a gut-wrenching, powerfully moving film.
Timothy Hutton, Donald Sutherland, and Mary Tyler Moore give superb performances as family members struggling to reconnect with one another after the tragedy. Hutton won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his raw, riveting portrayal of young Conrad Jarrett. Moore plays his mother, an emotionally unavailable woman barricading herself from further distress by ignoring her family’s problems, even after Conrad tries to take his own life. Sutherland plays the father, the mediator between mother and son, desperately trying to hold his family together. Judd Hirsch appears as Conrad’s therapist, a savior shrink who forces Conrad to confront his guilt and fear.
What an odd, beguiling vigilante road-trip romance this is. Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek star as two oddly unaffected youths who casually pair up and embark on what turns out to be a killing spree through South Dakota. This was director Terrence Malick’s (Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line) first feature film, and much of his trademark style is here — the beautiful scenery, cutaways to flora, fauna, and natural phenomena (including the most beautiful house burning put to film), as well as voice-over narration that begs a more poetic interpretation of the material.
