#239 – Ran, (乱), 1985, Akira Kurosawa
With Ran, legendary director Akira Kurosawa reimagines Shakespeare’s King Lear as a singular historical epic set in sixteenth-century Japan. Majestic in scope, the film is Kurosawa’s late-life masterpiece, a profound examination of the folly of war and the crumbling of one family under the weight of betrayal, greed, and the insatiable thirst for power.
JUMBO CACTUAR APPROVED FILM
#251 – Come and See, (Иди и смотри), 1985, Elem Klimov
The invasion of a village in Byelorussia by German forces sends young Florya into the forest to join the weary Resistance fighters, against his family’s wishes. There he meets a girl, Glasha, who accompanies him back to his village. On returning home, Florya finds his family and fellow peasants massacred. His continued survival amidst the brutal debris of war becomes increasingly nightmarish, a battle between despair and hope.
#283 – Brazil, 1985, Terry Gilliam
Low-level bureaucrat Sam Lowry escapes the monotony of his day-to-day life through a recurring daydream of himself as a virtuous hero saving a beautiful damsel. Investigating a case that led to the wrongful arrest and eventual death of an innocent man instead of wanted terrorist Harry Tuttle, he meets the woman from his daydream, and in trying to help her gets caught in a web of mistaken identities, mindless bureaucracy and lies.
#400 – Vagabond, (Sans toit ni loi), 1985, Agnès Varda
Mona Bergeron is dead, her frozen body found in a ditch in the French countryside. From this, the film flashes back to the weeks leading up to her death. Through these flashbacks, Mona gradually declines as she travels from place to place, taking odd jobs and staying with whomever will offer her a place to sleep. Mona is fiercely independent, craving freedom over comfort, but it is this desire to be free that will eventually lead to her demise.
#463 – The Breakfast Club, 1985, John Hughes
Five disparate high school students meet in Saturday detention, and discover they have a lot more in common than they thought.
#784 – Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, 1985, Paul Schrader
A fictional account of the life of Japanese author Yukio Mishima told in four parts. The first three parts relate events in three of his novels: The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Kyoko’s House, and Runaway Horses. The last part depicts the events of 25th November 1970.
JUMBO CACTUAR APPROVED FILM
#908 – A Time to Live, a Time to Die, (童年往事), 1985, Hou Hsiao-hsien
The semi-autobiographical film on director Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s childhood and adolescence, when he was growing up in Taiwan, living through the deaths of his father, mother and grandmother.
#979 – Typhoon Club, (台風クラブ), 1985, Shinji Sômai
The movie takes place in the five-day period before, during and after a ferocious, seemingly liberating typhoon, which five of the students endure while marooned in their school gymnasium.
Jumbo Cactuar Film Index 