1985 Movies
Take a nostalgic look back at the top movies of 1985, celebrating the films, directors and actors that defined the year and left a lasting legacy in the world of entertainment.
La notte
Directed by: Michelangelo Antonioni
Starring: Jeanne Moreau, Marcello Mastroianni, Monica Vitti, Bernhard Wicki
Country: United States of America
Outline: A day in the life of an unfaithful married couple and their steadily deteriorating relationship.
Bitter Harvest
Directed by: George Mendeluk
Starring: Max Irons, Samantha Barks, Terence Stamp, Barry Pepper
Country: Canada
Outline: Set in 1930s Ukraine, as Stalin advances the ambitions of communists in the Kremlin, young artist Yuri battles to save his lover Natalka from the Holodomor, the death-by-starvation program that ultimately killed millions of Ukrainians.
Phenomena
Directed by: Dario Argento
Starring: Jennifer Connelly, Dalila Di Lazzaro, Daria Nicolodi, Kaspar Capparoni, Fiore Argento, Michele Soavi, Donald Pleasence, Federica Mastroianni, Patrick Bauchau, Fiorenza Tessari, Franco Trevisi, Fulvio Mingozzi
Country: Italy
Maccheroni
Directed by: Ettore Scola
Starring: Marcello Mastroianni, Daria Nicolodi, Jack Lemmon, Isa Danieli, Ernesto Mahieux, Marta Bifano, Franco Angrisano, Orsetta Gregoretti, Giovanni Mauriello, Patrizia Sacchi, Jean-François Perrier, Maria Luisa Santella
Country: Italy
Back to the Future
Directed by: Robert Zemeckis
Starring: Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Lea Thompson, Crispin Glover
Country: United States of America
Outline: Marty McFly, a 17-year-old high school student, is accidentally sent thirty years into the past in a time-traveling DeLorean invented by his close friend, the maverick scientist Doc Brown.
The Goonies
Directed by: Richard Donner
Starring: Sean Astin, Josh Brolin, Jeff Cohen, Corey Feldman
Country: United States of America
Outline: In order to save their home from foreclosure, a group of misfits set out to find a pirate's ancient valuable treasure.
The Color Purple
Directed by: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Danny Glover, Whoopi Goldberg, Oprah Winfrey, Margaret Avery
Country: United States of America
Outline: A black Southern woman struggles to find her identity after suffering abuse from her father and others over four decades.
Witness
Directed by: Peter Weir
Starring: Harrison Ford, Kelly McGillis, Lukas Haas, Josef Sommer
Country: United States of America
Outline: A young Amish boy is sole witness to a murder; policeman John Book goes into hiding in Amish country to protect him until the trial.
Out of Africa
Directed by: Sydney Pollack
Starring: Meryl Streep, Robert Redford, Klaus Maria Brandauer, Michael Kitchen
Country: United States of America
Outline: In 20th-century colonial Kenya, a Danish baroness/plantation owner has a passionate love affair with a free-spirited big-game hunter.
Stir Crazy
Directed by: Sidney Poitier
Starring: Gene Wilder, Richard Pryor, Georg Stanford Brown, JoBeth Williams
Country: United States of America
Outline: Set up and wrongfully accused, two best friends will be sent to prison for a crime they didn't commit. However, no prison cell could keep them locked in.
Rocky IV
Directed by: Sylvester Stallone
Starring: Sylvester Stallone, Talia Shire, Burt Young, Carl Weathers
Country: United States of America
Outline: Rocky Balboa proudly holds the world heavyweight boxing championship, but a new challenger has stepped forward: Drago, a six-foot-four, 261-pound fighter who has the backing of the Soviet Union.
Cocoon
Directed by: Ron Howard
Starring: Don Ameche, Wilford Brimley, Hume Cronyn, Brian Dennehy
Country: United States of America
Outline: When a group of trespassing seniors swim in a pool containing alien cocoons, they find themselves energized with youthful vigor.
Rambo: First Blood Part II
Directed by: George P. Cosmatos
Starring: Sylvester Stallone, Richard Crenna, Charles Napier, Steven Berkoff
Country: United States of America
Outline: John Rambo is released from prison by the government for a top-secret covert mission to the last place on Earth he'd want to return - the jungles of Vietnam.
Ran
Directed by: Akira Kurosawa
Starring: Tatsuya Nakadai, Akira Terao, Jinpachi Nezu, Daisuke Ryû
Country: United States of America
Outline: In Medieval Japan, an elderly warlord retires, handing over his empire to his three sons. However, he vastly underestimates how the new-found power will corrupt them and cause them to turn on each other...and him.
Come and See
Directed by: Elem Klimov
Starring: Aleksey Kravchenko, Olga Mironova, Liubomiras Laucevicius, Vladas Bagdonas
Country: United States of America
Outline: After finding an old rifle, a young boy joins the Soviet resistance movement against ruthless German forces and experiences the horrors of World War II.
Brazil
Directed by: Terry Gilliam
Starring: Jonathan Pryce, Kim Greist, Robert De Niro, Katherine Helmond
Country: United States of America
Outline: A bureaucrat, in a retro-future world, tries to correct an administrative error, and becomes an enemy of the state.
The Breakfast Club
Directed by: John Hughes
Starring: Emilio Estevez, Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald, Ally Sheedy
Country: United States of America
Outline: Five high school students meet in Saturday detention and discover how they have a lot more in common than they thought.
After Hours
Directed by: Martin Scorsese
Starring: Griffin Dunne, Rosanna Arquette, Verna Bloom, Tommy Chong
Country: United States of America
Outline: An ordinary word processor has the worst night of his life after he agrees to visit a girl in Soho who he met that evening at a coffee shop.
The Purple Rose of Cairo
Directed by: Woody Allen
Starring: Mia Farrow, Jeff Daniels, Danny Aiello, Irving Metzman
Outline: In New Jersey in 1935, a movie character walks off the screen and into the real world.
Moonlighting
Directed by: Jerzy Skolimowski
Starring: Jeremy Irons, Eugene Lipinski, Jirí Stanislav, Eugeniusz Haczkiewicz
Outline: A Polish contractor, Nowak, leads a group of workmen to London so they can provide cheap labor for a government official based there. Nowak (Irons) has to manage the project and the men as ...
The Trip to Bountiful
Directed by: Peter Masterson
Starring: Geraldine Page, John Heard, Carlin Glynn, Richard Bradford
Outline: In 1940s Texas, an elderly woman is determined to visit her childhood home for one last time.
The Adventures of Mark Twain
Directed by: Will Vinton
Starring: James Whitmore, Michele Mariana, Gary Krug, Chris Ritchie
Outline: Tom Sawyer, Becky Thatcher and Huck Finn join Mark Twain on his airship to meet Halley's Comet.
The Return of the Living Dead
Directed by: Dan O'Bannon
Starring: Clu Gulager, James Karen, Don Calfa, Thom Mathews
Country: United States of America
Outline: When two bumbling employees at a medical supply warehouse accidentally release a deadly gas into the air, the vapors cause the dead to rise again as zombies.
A Room with a View
Directed by: James Ivory
Starring: Maggie Smith, Helena Bonham Carter, Denholm Elliott, Julian Sands
Country: United States of America
Outline: When Lucy Honeychurch and chaperone Charlotte Bartlett find themselves in Florence with rooms without views, fellow guests Mr Emerson and son George step in to remedy the situation. Meeting...
Kiss of the Spider Woman
Directed by: Hector Babenco
Starring: William Hurt, Raul Julia, Sônia Braga, José Lewgoy
Outline: A gay man and a political prisoner are together in a prison. The gay man narrates the stories of two fake movies and his own life.
What happened in 1985?
Discover what the world looked like in 1985: