A decadent decade for film

Contributing editor Mike Wilmington looks back at the cinema of the 1980s. "The great American movies of a disreputable, overblown decade were often disreputable and overblown themselves," he writes, "overreaching, violent, often slightly crazy movies - and, if they went against the grain of the cultural drift, they did so with reckless abandon." Among his picks of the decade's best: Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America, Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters, Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull, Francis Ford Coppola's Rumblefish, John Huston's The Dead, Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, John Cassavetes' Love Streams, Philip Kaufman's The Right Stuff, Milos Forman's Ragtime and Robert Altman's Secret Honor. Topping his foreign-language picks are Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander and Akira Kurosawa's Ran.