In the 1980s, if you wanted to ask someone on a date, you had to pick up the receiver of a landline telephone, hope that your prospective date was near their own landline, choose a place to meet, show up somewhere near the predetermined time, and engage with that person for the entirety of the date. And don’t even get me started on maps.

Yes, the world has changed since then—but that doesn’t mean the movies made in the 1980s are any less significant in 2025. What we were thinking up four decades ago was wild, wonderful, woolly, and rather chauvinist, but it was also violent, aspirational, moneyed, and a calculation of noise. The world was beginning to change very rapidly, and directors, actors, producers, and audiences were taking note. The films made for Gen X and their boomer parents wa

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