Documentaries became formally innovative, socially insightful and more popular than ever. Several major directors brought their A game to the 1980s, a transfusion of fresh-blood filmmakers hit the scene with breakthrough works and bold debuts, and a handful of veteran international auteurs made late masterpieces. Genres like science fiction and horror hit new heights. But that 10-year period minted a handful of Hall of Fame movie stars. It was a lull, a pressed pause button, a clearing of the throat in between arias. For a long time, the Eighties were considered a bit of a cinematic dead zone stuck between the New Hollywood/modern blockbuster-inventing Seventies and the edgier, irony-heavy Indie Revolution Nineties. (Thank you for three of those things.) And if you went to the movies regularly, you were blessed with a steady diet of horny teens, killer robots, homesick extraterrestrials, raging bulls, road warriors, cop-and-crook team-ups, and more dystopian visions of the future than you could shake a time-traveling DeLorean at. It was the decade that gave us the Reagan administration, Rubik’s cubes, “The Reflex” and Run DMC.
