Cinema: Best Of 1980

Altered States. A modern Dr. Jekyll unleashes the primal beast within himself. The meeting of Paddy Chayefsky and Ken Russell set off a daft, cagey combustion of ideas and styles, producing a fantasy of delirium and delight.

The Big Red One. Veteran Action Director Samuel Fuller's elegy to a genre he loves (war movies) and a life he lived (as a young soldier in a famous World War II division). Tough, sentimental, definitive.

The Elephant Man. David Lynch transforms the story of John Merrick--the noble ogre of Victorian England--into a grim, lovely fairy tale. John Hurt inhabits Merrick with grace and spirit in the year's sweetest movie.

The Empire Strikes Back--with even more thrills, derring-do, spectacular special effects and emotional resonance than Star Wars.

Melvin and Howard. An American dreamer, Melvin Dummar, goes for the big score, insisting he is the heir of Howard Hughes. Jonathan Demme directed the screwiest and most original movie of 1980, and deserves a better commercial fate than he has so far received.

Mon Oncle d'Amerique. Screenwriter Jean Gruault and Director Alain Resnais have devised a lecture on human behavior that is also a delightful comedy of manners. Demands and rewards intelligence. Take notes, and enjoy.

Ordinary People. The only American film of 1980 to touch, effectively and wrenchingly, the most common chord: the way family members try, and fail, to love one another. Sensitively directed (by Robert Redford) and performed.

Raging Bull. Robert De Niro and Director Martin Scorsese reveal little of the psychology that drove Boxer Jake La Motta, but much about their own passion and intelligence for making movies. A technical knockout.

Return of the Secaucus Seven. Seven veterans of the antiwar movement meet, on the cusp of maturity, ten years after. John Sayles wrote the year's wittiest screenplay, found humor and humanity in his subject--and did it all for $60,000.

Wise Blood. John Huston, at his eccentric best, adapts the Flannery O'Connor tale about a Godforsaken evangelist. For red-clay craziness -weird, scary and funny--this is the one.

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