1984: Overstreet's Favorite Films

Here is the current (but occasionally updated) list of my favorite films from 1984.

In order to understand the purpose and meaning of this list, please read my introduction to the Looking Closer Favorite Films lists here.

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1984

1. Amadeus
2. Top Secret!
3. Blood Simple
4. This is Spinal Tap
5. Paris, Texas
6. Gremlins
7. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
8. The Terence Davies Trilogy*
9. Stranger Than Paradise
10. Stop Making Sense
11. Birdy
12. The Company of Wolves
13. The Terminator
14. The Brother from Another Planet
15. Meantime
16. A Passage to India

• Ghostbusters
• The Karate Kid
• Starman
• The Bounty
• Sixteen Candles
• The Muppets Take Manhattan
• Dune
• The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension
• Broadway Danny Rose

As-yet Unseen or Unratable Films of 1984

1984
A Girl’s Own Story (Jane Campion)
A Nightmare on Elm Street
A Private Function
A Soldier’s Story
A Sunday in the Country (Bertrand Tavernier)
A Year of the Quiet Sun (Krzysztof Zanussi)
All of Me
American Taboo (Steve Lustgarten)
Another Country (Marek Kanievska)
Beat Street (Stan Lathan)
Body Double (Brian De Palma)
Boy Meets Girl (Leos Carax)
Carmen
Choose Me (Alan Rudolph)
Comfort and Joy (Bill Forsyth)
Conan the Destroyer (Richard Fleischer)
Condemned (Mario O’Hara)*
Country
Dangerous Moves
Dreamscape (Joseph Ruben)
Eight Diagram Pole Fighter (Liu Chia-Liang)
Fear City (Abel Ferrara)
Firstborn (Michael Apted)
Flowers of the City Jail (Mario O’Hara)
Full Moon in Paris (Eric Rohmer)
Heimat
Iceman
Kaos (Paolo and Vittorio Taviani)
L’amour a mort (Alain Resnais)
L’amour par terre (Jacques Rivette)
Les enfants (Marguerite Duras, Jean Mascolo, and Jean-Marc Turine)
Love Streams
Love Streams (John Cassavetes)
MacArthur’s Children
Manuel on the Island of Wonders (Raul Ruiz)
Maria’s Lovers (Andrei Konchalovsky)
Meantime (Mike Leigh)
Memories of Prison (Nelson Pereira dos Santos)
Micki & Maude
Moscow on the Hudson (Paul Mazursky)
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
Next of Kin (Atom Egoyan)
Night of the Comet (Thom Eberhardt)
Once Upon a Time in America (Sergio Leone)
Paso Doble (Lothar Lambert)
Places in the Heart
Purple Rain
Reckless (James Foley)
Repentance (Tengiz Abuladze)
Repo Man
Secret Honor (Robert Altman)
Shanghai Blues (Tsui Hark)
Special Effects (Larry Cohen)
Streets of Fire (Walter Hill)
Summer at Grandpa’s (Hou Hsiao-hsien)
Tarang (Kumar Shahani)
That Was Rock
The Cotton Club (Francis Ford Coppola)
The Element of Crime (Lars Von Trier)
The Flamingo Kid
The Funeral (Juzo Itami)
The Killing Fields
The Legend of the Suram Fortress (Sergei Parajanov)
The Natural
The Neverending Story (Wolfgang Petersen)
The Stone Boy
The Times of Harvey Milk
The Wannsee Conference
Threads
Tightrope (Richard Tuggle)
Time of Desire (Yuli Raizman)
Under the Volcano (John Huston)
What Have I Done to Deserve This? (Pedro Almodovar)
Wildrose
Woody Guthrie: Hard Travelin’
Yellow Earth