So you love the 80s? I suppose that sentiment never left (when it comes to movies), but it’s come back in a big way thanks to Netflix’s 1980s self-aware sci-fi series, Stranger Things. That series references many films from the 80s, and obsessives have compiled all the references. From its Evil Dead poster on the wall, to its Stand by Me band of friends on a quest to find a body (this one alive) and the musical score that would fit easily into a John Carpenter film. And beyond.

There are many more references, but those have been detailed all over the Internet. Many of the referenced films are indeed classics and deserve to get Valentines from modern filmmakers (though, for me, Stranger Things is less a love letter and more of a late night text barrage). However, we’re beginning to look at 1980s cinema with blinders on, only referencing certain directors and certain films. If the 70s were a decade under the influence, then the 80s are a decade of our current influences. From major political commentary to major action films, to envelope-pushing horror and exploitation films—with many midsummer sex comedies and sci-fi spectacles thrown in—it’s a great decade to mine from. Let’s just not lose focus of some films that haven’t been getting a lot of nostalgic shine lately.

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Image via Netflix

If the films of Carpenter, Steven Spielberg, Rob Reiner and Ridley Scott and Tony Scott are the shinier things, then these 20 films are the less showier things. The great 80s movies that time forgot.

I feel an eye roll coming for that title, but the method for making the final list was first created by coming up with magnificent films that aren’t mentioned with great frequency and/or haven’t received the Criterion treatment or a big splashy rerelease recently. And then that list was whittled down to only include films that have received less than 10,000 ratings on IMDb. For what better barometer do we have of what’s becoming forgotten than stagnant database pages? (For the interested, I trimmed a few titles that were north of that barrier, such as The Changeling, Jonathan Demme's Married to the MobBrian De Palma’s Body Double and surprisingly, the psychosexual terror of Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession, R.I.P.).

Now that you know the method, my 36 selections (featuring at least one for each year of the decade) are listed below. Sound off on some of your favorites, what you think was missed (remember that 10K vote methodology) and what sounds intriguing enough to give a shot.

Related: 15 Great 90s Movies That Time Forgot

Melvin and Howard (1980)

Melvin and Howard kicks off this decade list with Jonathan Demme's graceful and screwball approach to the 1980s money-obsessed landscape. Always being up-sold something would dot Demme's lively output for the decade—from Swing Shift to Something Wild to Married to the Mob, which reduces mafia movies to a fast food jingle—but before the decade boomed with excess, Demme began with a tranquil twilight recreation. Melvin and Howard is a gentle lullaby of hopeful kitsch; the calm before the hyper-Capitalist storm.

A motorcycle races through the dark, a speck of dust spitting up dust, alongside a larger highway. The wildman on the motorcycle claims he's Howard Hughes (Jason Robards), the man who picks him up, a people-pleasin' goof songwriter  named Melvin(Paul Le Mat), and for an act of kidness in picking him from the side of the road and taking the ole grouch to his final destination, the man says he'll include him in his will. A will does end up comin' and so then do the lawyers for the family members who want every bit of Hughes' wealth kept amongst themselves.

Demme's landscape includes a burlesque revue, a landlocked boat, a TV contest and an aces Marty Steenburgen for all; all of those venues represent a hope for the down-trodden (and reinforce the John Steinbeck quote that an economic revolution will never happen "because the American poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires") but unlike social services or a gas station lotto, it's entertainment. There's so much cake to eat here, from Robards' bum-looking millionaire fighting through mental illness to the lawyer circus surrounding the poverty-line songwriter. He'd certainly become an unwitting folk hero by inheriting millions; trouble is, family doesn't allow for outsider heroes. Millions of dollars come and go like the breeze over a desert in Melvin and Howard, but personal nirvana for the bum-like billionaire and the near-bum Le Mat, are pretty similar in nature. It's a warm and delicate reminder, particularly as the decade of excess is the sun that's rising tomorrow.

Mon Oncle D'Amerique (1980)

Alain Resnais is most known for his arty cinema like Hiroshima, mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad, where black-and-white images and whispered narration—cut with neutron bombs, declarations of love, and beautiful people in hallways who are dressed elegantly but have nothing to do—made for the type of films that philistine folks would mock when people talked about foreign films. Mon Oncle D’Amerique is his most pop aware, star-studded (Gerard Depardieu, at the height of his French popularity) and most humorous film. But it still is very arty and philosophical; it’s his easiest film to digest but it’s nevertheless exciting because it’s so easy to digest as a film with direct messages, but you’re still left pondering your own existence afterward.

Depardieu plays one of three adults who come from different walks of life. He’s a bourgeois politician who leaves his wife for a young Communist who ran away to join the theater (Nicole Garcia), but no longer rebels after she experiences his lavish lifestyle. The other is a farm boy (Roger Pierre) who leaves his pregnant girlfriend to get a better job at a mill in the city. All three make choices to run away from something. We call this free will. A fourth individual in Mon Oncle breaks the fourth wall and re-creates their interactions with real mice and humans dressed as mice while narrating various experiments. He’s Henri Laborit, a famous philosopher whose teachings laid the groundwork for advertising market research. Mon Oncle D’Amerique is funny. It’s dramatic. But it’s also very illuminating of human experience—how we condition ourselves to survive, resign, or fight with one another.

Alligator (1980)

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Image via Group 1 Films

Alligator, is a 1980s horror movie conceived to be by the numbers only, but coming from the pen of John Sayles, it’s no surprise that this is actually a character-driven horror film that saves seeing the giant alligator for the third act. And when you get to see it head-to-tail (in the daylight no less!) it's crashing a fancy city fundraiser. Lewis Teague’s film is quite a lot of fun in the eventual creature carnage, but also as a police procedural.

Robert Forster leads the film, as a cop with a history, who goes up against the press whataboutisms—involving a partner of his who died in the past—when the real pressing concern is an alligator that's larger than an automobile and has bust through the concrete and is snack, snack, snacking away on humans. It would be so easy for the film to just go that route, and though that's what tips the movie into some gleeful territory, it’s extra-special because Teague and Sayles invest in characters throughout the runtime. There’s a subplot of Forster, ridiculed in the press, calmly disarming a bomb to show that he can keenly react in tense situations, despite the press narrative that's dogging him about not pulling his gun fast enough to save his partner.

Between this and Crawl (and to a lesser extent, Lake Placid), the alligator creature feature is an example of great compact storytelling.

The Night of the Hunted (1980)

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Image via Impex Films

Jean Rollins’ amnesia horror movie has an all-time great horror opening, a marvelous ending, a prolonged sex scene, and a plot about a building of people collectively losing their mind so they start mindlessly having sex with each other and killing each other/themselves. So, yeah, The Night of the Hunted is not a bad night at the movies!

The opening is similar to a film noir movie, a woman in a hospital gown (Brigitte Lahaie) escapes from a tall building to the road to flag down a car, except she's being chased by her friend who she can't remember, and the stranger (Alain Duclos) who picks her up takes her back to his place to shag on his polar bear rug. Then the woman is taken back to the tower of forgetfulness by some shadowy doctors who snatch her back up and her savior, who took advantage of her amnesia before, sets out to try and save her in a bizarre Romeo & Juliet fashion.

This is not the best Rollin movie but it might have the best plot from any of his movies I've watched. Just be prepared for that sex scene, it's long enough that you or anyone in your vicinity will assume you're watching a vintage porno; but the length of the scene justifies itself as Lahaie fights with her inability to remember anything in her mind with the pleasure she feels in the moment; a hazy thriller opening that would make Alfred Hitchcock blush. Its use eventually makes the ending somewhat touching! Two plants, intertwined, about to bloom.

Looker (1981)

How is Looker not already a cult classic? Is it because Albert Finney wears high wasted-pants during a shootout and that's not meant to be ironically funny? Michael Crichton's beauty-in-advertising satire is some straight up Nicholas Ray + Frank Tashlin meets B-John Carpenter shit. I suppose a reason why it's lesser known in cult factions is because it's an earnest satire and not cooly detached. But that's also what makes it unique.

Looker concerns a brainwashing advertising conspiracy that a plastic surgeon (Finney) uncovers because his beautiful model clients keep coming back to him with orders for specific centimeter measurements paid for by one agency and then they end up dead a few days later. The specific measurements are for advertising beauty requirements that will make actors replaceable by A.I.

Nothing about Chrichton's movie fits the proper mold of cult classic but damnit it should mentioned right up there with They Live. And some aspects of Looker are done even better than many 80s cult classics. Firstly, the cinematography and set design is more dazzling than anything Chrichton's ever written. Yes, the story is ludicrous but it allows for a lot of great set pieces and fake commercials that are full of surprises (especially when they're filmed in front of an audience of investors). But the biggest surprise is that for an 80s movie that's centered on models, not a single model is treated like a dummy airhead or even leered at. Industry standards and a short (shelf) life lends them more sympathy than most early-in-the-film horror victims. And Finney's plastic surgeon is just a standup dude. (Aside: When esteemed actors stoop to low genre, Finney is probably my favorite. He's essentially the same good guy rascal here that he is in Erin Brockovich or Tom Jones; see: Wolfen for further proof; Finney's early 80s was Swiss Army Genre Dad).

There are some dumb plot shifts in Looker but even those are earnest and aligned with 50s low-budget sci-fi. They Live had sunglasses to show the truth, but here in Looker, only a few years earlier, the only way you could block out mind-controlling advertisements was the old fashioned way: by putting her hand over your eyes.

Stylistically, there are a few camera punches, backdrop shadows and computer simulation scans that are just pure art. Shout out to the once cinematographer of Nashville, Paul Lohmann, and the future production designer of Tron, Dean Edwart Mitzner, whose work here has aged better than that movie. This is kinda the perfect 80s socially conscious popcorn movie, in the same way that Gremlins and the aforementioned They Live are.

Ms. 45 (1981)

Because he doesn’t use the killing of men to wash away awful rape scenes, director Abel Ferrara (Bad Lieutenant) punked the “rape-revenge” subgenre (and exploitation films in general) with Ms. 45. In fact, Ferrara even paints himself as a victimizer behind the camera. This is a film that boxes in its victim and constantly pushes her into corners (the victim is mute for christsakes!). Ultimately, Ms. 45 expresses something we should all be able to agree with, that the societal silencing of women in rape cases is awful, but also, in a less popular opinion, so might be the filmmaker who makes an exploitation film about it. There’s a droney and acidic score, a dress-up disco party, a pentagram gang, and numerous other genre awareness tropes that take you to the edge of a thrill and then says, “fuck you.”

There are two rapes and they are shocking here. They happen back-to-back on one awful day and it shatters the worldview of a beautiful mute woman (Zoe Lund) who cannot call for help. The first rape is in an alleyway and the rapist is the director himself, Ferrara. The second happens when she returns home and a burglar is in the house. He is killed in gruesome fashion and Lund purchases a gun (and later a nun costume to hide her features) and begins offing catcallers, stalkers, and anyone who takes away her dignity when she can’t even talk back. After a few kills, her methodology gets muddled and more bloodlust-y. The score is great. Lund is great. And New York has never looked this soul-crushingly sick.

Ms. 45 lacks gratuitous nudity and the forced sex is frightening, as it focuses on the horror of her face; a face that can’t scream for help. Rape is awful and should make you uncomfortable. Having it happen back-to-back is a blatant admonishment of the audience who’s ready to get into the genre kills but might not have let the full scope of depravity seep in yet. Because Ferrara is the man who attacks her first and leaves Lund in a pile of garbage, the film routinely puts her gun square in the center of the frame and Ms. 45 turns into a film about desiring to kill the man who is making her constantly go over the pain that was caused to her: Ferrara, the director of her first film.

Prince of the City (1981)

Sidney Lumet (12 Angry Men, Network) had made a film about a whistleblower detective against the corrupt NYPD before, Serpico, and many think it’s one of the best films of the 70s. But Lumet felt guilty for showing the cops who opposed Serpico as so one-dimensional. Prince of the City, which also details an NYPD police officer who records and turns in other policemen, is done not with a hero vs. everyone else story line, but instead shows a flawed individual, who is used by a flawed governmental whistleblower system, and shows that both decent cops and bad cops both go through a judicial minefield where every investigator or District Attorney is trying to get promoted through this case.

Treat Williams plays Daniel Ciello (based on Robert Leuci) a narcotics investigator who is loyal to his partners. That loyalty eventually blurs into a loyalty to his informants, which sees him scoring heroin for them so that they’ll continue to tip off the suppliers. It’s important that Ciello isn’t a perfect cop who exposes corruption, but instead is a flawed cop who returns the calls of federal watchdogs because he feels guilty and can’t pinpoint when the lines began to gray for him professionally. And the resulting film, involving more than six dozen speaking parts and sprawling for nearly three hours, is more about the lengthy litigation process (which is slowed down by all of his initial agents getting promoted for their work on this case; thereby he’s shown no loyalty, just a pat on the back and left for new egos to tend to) than it is about dirty cops. One lawyer notes, rather profoundly, that we never hear of “a whistleblowing doctor or lawyer”. Prince of the City shows that while there’s dignity in a policeman’s attempts to come clean, it’s almost as murky as a junkie’s attempts to come clean.

Wolfen (1981)

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Wolfen is perhaps the most curious film on this list. It’s the only narrative film from Michael Wadleigh the director of Woodstock. The cast is intriguing and a bit oddball, starring Albert Finney, Diane Venora, Gregory Hines and Edward James Olmos. And although it’s a horror film that first introduced the in-camera thermography to show the predator’s point of view, staying low to the ground and pouncing on victims whose bodies are gradients of heat (later used more famously by Predator), there’s a pretty heady story about Native American land rights and an anti-gentrification stance in this film.

What are the Wolfen? An advanced species of wolves that can exchange souls with specific tribes of humans. They’ve taken residence in an abandoned Bronx housing project that wealthy individuals are about to bulldoze over to put another corporate monstrosity. Wolfen is a horror film with an extra layer that shows that every race and every species has a right to protect their land.

Liquid Sky (1982)

“Two Miss Americas.”

Fashion photographer: “And we could end it the two of them fucking!”

Margaret: “He can’t fuck.”

Jimmy: “I can too fuck. I just can’t fuck you.”

Liquid Sky is a lo-fi pansexual delight about junkie fashion models and the aliens who are harvesting the endorphins from their orgasms. Anne Carlisle plays both the quotable Margaret and the quotable Jimmy. She is beautiful as both a woman and as a man; id and ego. This film is quintessential counterculture 80s, which—like the American mainstream—was all about excess and entitlement. But the excess and entitlement here is to drugs of any kind and sex of any gender.

Its strange sci-fi leanings and genre mashups (at times this is a “rhythm box” musical, exciting neon runway show and a hyper-sexual gender-fluid experiment) make it every bit as much fun as Alex Cox’s Repo Man, just far less known (probably for that whole sexual fluidity thing; oh, and the novice acting). Slava Tsukerman’s film deserves its cult status.

Trance (1982)

The horror conclusion and electro soundtrack is what makes Trance a cult film but it's the build to that conclusion that's truly divine. This West German film follows a young woman (Desiree Nosbusch) who is obsessed with an emerging pop star who's remained an enigma by only going by the name R and saying very little in interviews; we're talking a deranged obsession here. She harasses a postman for not delivering her a response to one of her many, many "we're soulmates" fan letters. She skips school, she withdraws from her family (except when R performs on TV), and after seven days of no letters, she hitchhikes to Munich to find him. The type of music R makes—minimalist synths and deadpan lyrics with repetitive keys—is a perfect soundtrack for Simone's repetitive and morose obsession, abstaining from all human contact except when writing her letters. And the film's imagery and pace perfectly matches that music style; occasional twitches that blip like a heart monitor for someone on life support.

I don't think the cult-film ending works, personally, but Trance is a well-crafted find for fans of post-punk and rancid teen spirit; and genre fans should definitely seek it out to form their own opinion on the two halves of the film. But Simone's parent's statement that they didn't call in a missing person's report for her—in order to prevent a scandal—perhaps reinforces how isolated and alone she truly is. And why she's drawn to such a blank slate human being whose song lyrics smack of depression and an identity crisis.

Vice Squad (1982)

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Image via Embassy Pictures

Gary Sherman’s Vice Squad is a down in the gutter LA tour of hell. It follows a single mother prostitute (Season Hubley) who’s forced to work undercover for the LAPD in order to arrest a homicidal, misogynistic pimp named Ramrod (Wings Hauser), who is in a whole other league of nasty. Wings Hauser is absolutely terrifying in this film. Pure snarl.

Vice Squad is less of a film and more of a Grand Theft Auto tour of the underbelly of Los Angeles, every hourly hotel and every shop that lights the street with a neon sign after midnight; [Stefon voice] this movie has it all: dogs in sunglasses, leather daddies, pimps in feather hats, pimps in cowboy hats, and the menacing villain even sings the theme song because he owns these streets! He’s enough to make you yell, “fuck you!” even if you’re alone at home. Ramrod gets in your head like that.

Baby It's You (1983)

John Sayles, the working man’s filmmaker who got his start in Roger Corman’s grindhouse fantasia with scripts for Piranha and The Lady in Red, is best known for his socially conscious portraits of the working man. Whether they were miners going up against union busters in Matewan, or an alien who takes the form of a black man in America in The Brother from Another Planet or The Boss to workers everywhere, in an iconic and still misunderstood video for Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.”, Sayles’ heart always beat for those who were being both denied—and fed the falsehood of—the American Dream. Still, with Baby It’s You, Sayles also made one of the absolute best teen dramas set in a high school where the American Dream feels possible for some and distant for others.

Set in a 1960s New Jersey high school, Jill Rosen (Rosanna Arquette) is prepping to go to college and finds herself drawn to the slick crooner from the wrong side of the tracks, a fella who guys by the name of The Sheik (Vincent Spano). It’s a familiar set up, yes, but with a lot of heart and attention to various period details. The masterstroke of Baby It’s You is that it doesn’t end in high school, but continues to follow her collegiate path and his destructive path. You are aware that these two probably shouldn’t be together, but you want the best for each of them.

In 2016, Baby It’s You is most known as a trivia footnote, for featuring the film debut of Robert Downey, Jr. (in a very small role), but it should really be sought out to experience. Arquette turns in an amazing performance, Sayles is delicate in his direction and the script (co-written with Amy Robinson) is perhaps the most authentic high school-to-college transformational romance ever made by an American movie studio.

The Ballad of Narayama (1983)

The 1958 film of the same name (by Keisuke Kinoshita) received a crisp Criterion Collection reissue, but Shohei Imamura’s film richly deserves the same treatment. The “ballad” concerns a rural Japanese village where residents who make it to the age of 70 must climb the Narayama Mountain and await their death.

This particular ballad is for the matriarch of a family of three unwed sons. As she approaches her 70th birthday, she attempts to marry them all off. One is honorable (Ken Ogata), and finding him a match proves easy, though perhaps the woman is not as honorable as she leads his mother to believe. The other two sons are in hopeless situations. One is known as the Stinker and he’s disheveled, dirty and sexually frustrated. He hears of a sick man’s request for his wife to sleep with every man in the village before he dies. The catch? Don’t sleep with Stinker. The last son is able to find his own match and they are young, in love, and need no help in sexual situations. The problem is, her father is a thief, and the town reacts to that family’s presence in one of the most horrifying long takes you’ll ever see.

The Ballad of Narayama has a lyrical title and it’s a lyrical film. It views these characters omnipotently from above, but their souls and the souls of those before them create a mist. It is not clear from the mountain; and nor is the matriarch sick enough to die anytime soon. You have the sense that she’ll be watching the tragic comedy of her sons for a very long time. The Ballad of Narayama is for fans of Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, taken down a few notches.

Star 80 (1983)

The possessive power that an image gives to the viewer is integral to Bob Fosse's (Cabaret, All That Jazz) final film. Star 80 shows how the male gaze creates ownership. And how that ownership is enhanced by an image that can be looked at whenever the person of power decides that they need to feel whatever addictive feeling is attached to it.

The true story of the murder of the young Playmate of the Year, Dorothy Stratten, is a bit of an oddity now because it doesn't attempt to humanize the delusional man who discovered her, sent her photos to Playboy, married her and then murdered her when she was going to leave him. The movie is better for lacking that attempt to humanize outright and just allows Eric Roberts to show moments of self-awareness at the monster inside his character. We see him explode into fits of rage and then retreat into apologies, we see him ex attempt to direct her photoshoots himself, not maliciously, but because he thinks he knows the correct response to achieve from a man who'd be looking. We observe his behavior instead of hearing him explain his past. And film is an image, so observation works best for seeing that level of compulsive control over capturing the correct imagery of someone else's body.

Star 80 observes his predatory ways of selling women at auto shows, at clubs, and then in his bedroom, to be sold to the world. He cheats on Dorothy (Mariel Hemingway) because he's addicted to using women to feel good about himself. He only grows attached to her when she begins to pull away, which causes the fixation to turn into a perverse display of surrounding himself in photos of her, floor to ceiling. Plastered in his bedroom are the Playboy centerfold photos and their wedding photos. The combination, of finding her and marrying, creates an encasement of ownership; it's less a shrine to her than it is a shrine to his feeling over ownership.

Roberts is fantastic, he doesn't go for sympathy, he goes for creepy in both his relationship with Dorothy but also his worship of Hugh Hefner (Cliff Robertson), a man he idolizes; he feels that Hefner should instantly see himself in this small-time hustler and Hefner doesn't. Hemingway is heartbreakingly sweet but also enigmatic; she gives canned fantasy answers in interviews and isn't self assure in her day to day life, allowing herself to be told what to do by the men who have the ability to give her a career that she didn't feel the desire to pursue on her own. She's so young, she's moldable and not yet sure who she is.

If I have a critique it's that Fosse goes easy on Hollywood by giving Peter Bogdanovich's real-life affair with Stratten (and subsequent marriage of her younger sister) a cover-up by giving him a stand-in director by the name of Aram Nicholas, despite Hefner getting his name used, and his mansion and parties are shown as an arena for sharks. He's also shown peering through the scope at nude models declaring that he likes that they're from small town Iowa, because it feeds the fantasy of the girl next door not the urban woman whom a bulk of his readership would never encounter. This girl could live right next to you! But Star 80 and Hollywood itself is quick to critique the arena of pornography and place themselves above it. There's a reason why film directors and producers are at these parties too. They too peddle in "the girl next door" territory and they too like to be surrounded by pretty young women who might not know what career they want for themselves but could be persuaded in many directions.

But that's a minor quibble. Star 80 is very, very good; even if you know where it's leading to from the outset. Roberts not getting an Oscar nomination for this also highlights Hollywood's inability to applaud a creep. But this is one of the best portraits of a creep as a young man that's ever been made.

Testament (1983)

The fear of a nuclear war missile strike was still immense in the 1980s and as such, it was dramatized a few times. Never has it looked like Lynne Littman’s Testament, however. The blast itself is a brief flash of light. Because the attack is in the distance, we don’t see rubble. We don’t see smoky streets. We see confused suburban people who try and make sense of what to do next when they cannot make contact with surrounding cities. Some homes are missing family and they wait for word from them. Most attempt to carry on and wait for authorities. Eventually the radiation leads to deaths. Bodies are buried. Eventually there are so many they are burned. And everyone in the town of Hamlin, California knows their days are numbered.

Generally, a nuclear blast film will show survivors on the road, disheveled, hungry and desperate. Testament, however, follows the nuclear family of a mother (Jane Alexander) and her children (including the screen debut of Lukas Haas) as they go about their day. They put on a school play. They sell batteries on the side of the road to those who flee. They offer shelter to the children whose parents didn’t come home. Eventually there are signs of sickness, but Littman doesn’t over-focus on the grossness. This is a very patient and maternal film, full of quiet horrors in situations where most filmmakers would go loud. There are tears to be shed from Testament, but none more so than a beautiful description of sex from Alexander to her oldest daughter, followed by a prick of sadness that her daughter will never understand how truthful her mother’s words are.

Pauline at the Beach (1983)

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Image via Orion

Pauline at the Beach is La Ronde (the famous play which starts with a lover and then follows one of those lovers to their marriage and so on and so forth until eventually it comes back around again to the starting point of the bed carousel) if told by Éric Rohmer. Which is to say, there are many conversations about love but only one person cheats on anyone because everyone else on the merry-go-round is so firmly attached to how they'd like to fall in love that they're unavailable to all the moving parts. Through a life’s work of romantic fables and discussions of love and sex, Rohmer’s characters always seem to know so much of what they want that they aren’t able to get it because it takes two people’s desires to be met and relationships ultimately work when there are concessions made rather than two people so similar in every desire that they perfectly align.

Pauline (Amanda Langlet) is a perceptive teenager on summer vacation with her sexy, about to be divorced, aunt, Marion (Arielle Dombalse). Marion is desired by a fling from years past, Pierre (Pascal Gerggory) but she has her eye on Henri (Féodor Atkine), a man who cannot be attached because his stance is to give in to every whim. Henri’s intelligence and carefree nature are the very things that make him desirable but not cut out for meeting a preconception of love and Pierre’s inability to express his own tangibles other than he’s better than the other guy, also does not set up for a winning romance. Meanwhile, Pauline is interested in a young boy on the beach and that boy’s covering for Henri during a cheating tryst throws everyone’s idealism naked onto the sand to be burnt by the sun and the only thing each potential lover shares is an idea that they know who’s best for everyone else.

What makes Pauline at the Beach so nice is that Rohmer is showing us a loss of innocence not through a summer losing virginity film like we’re accustomed, particularly from French films, but through observing all the masks that adults put on to further complicate a very confusing sensation: desire. Marion, Henri, and Pierre are more locked into their types and idea of life that they talk endlessly about that without anyone actually getting to know them really, just their ideals. And they explain everything away with half-truths before getting back on the road, carrying more baggage to the next ronde.

Angst (1983)

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Image via Les Films Jacques Leitienne

You won’t be prepared for this. Angst turned me white as a ghost, this is a warning for a very well-made film whose brutality is double the competent filmmaking and it’s very competent filmmaking, indeed.

Angst is a masterfully depraved portrait of a serial killer that has more in common with Krzysztof Kieslowski's Short Film About Killing (impressive photography, minimal dialogue) than Henry: A Portrait of a Serial Killer. The electro score from an ex-member of Tangerine Dream is fantastic. The camera, perched in the trees, attached to the actor's body, and swooping on ropes, is simply magnificent.

The narrative concerns a killer who’s been released from prison and immediately invades a home to kill. It’s a true story. The performance by Erwin Leder is superb, from dramatic sausage eating to unhinged kitchen sink bathing. There's a line in the narration about how no one could act as dead as the mother in this movie, but bravo to the actor’s corpses who are dragged to cars, lay motionless for long takes, etc.

Angst is a very tough watch that I'd only recommend to those who can appreciate and stomach Henry, Funny Games, etc. It’s more psychologically unsettling than your basic home invasion film; the main recommendation is the use of camera movement, matches for light, and door frame vantage points is evocative and eerie. It’s all expertly crafted. And in many ways, this is Poland’s In Cold Blood, a killing spree that shocked a nation and includes narration to provide background insight from actual testimony; while it’s shocking throughout, it doesn’t make you feel like it’s happy with the shocks, it simply desires to chart a map of a very sick, psychotic mind.

The Fourth Man (1983)

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Image via DE VERENIGDE NEDERLANDSCHE FILMCOMPAGNIE / THE KOBAL COLLECTION

Paul Verhoeven’s final Dutch film—before cozily moving on to become a Hollywood big-budget troublemaker with RoboCop, Showgirls, Starship Troopers, etc.—was The 4th Man. And though we identify him with subversiveness, nothing in his filmography is quite as subversive as The 4th Man because it’s subversion is psychological, opposed to confrontational. It shows sex as both tantalizing and devouring, but also too fleeting and physiological to actually inform a whole identity. Ideas make up your identity, not what’s between your legs.

As this is the most Lynch-ian movie in Verhoeven’s oeuvre, a plot synopsis doesn’t tell all, the dreams are the most telling, but here’s what can be told: an author, Gerard (Jeroen Krabbé), begins an affair with an alluringly stark, yet androgynous woman, Christina (Renée Soutendijk) who sells cosmetics, favor shears, and runs a night club called SPHINX. The SPHINX’s neon sign is burned out and only spells SPIN (Dutch for “Spider” and after meeting her at the bar, he’s placed into a web of confusion). Gerard, who is in a difficult long-term homosexual relationship, is at first attracted to Christina in an attempt to get closer to the younger man in her life (Thom Hoffman). But after experiencing a very different type of orgasm with her, he starts having strange nightmares and a crisis of identity.

The 4th Man is a combination of many of the great things that existed in Verhoeven’s foreign work—dark eroticism, lounging nudity, shocking sexual violence—but it’s his most demented religious film as well. “Being Catholic means having an imagination,” Gerard answers during a Q+A, when asked how someone can still be religious during an age of expanding science. After having his mind blown by sex, Gerard is unable to differentiate between what horrors are real and which made-up horrors he’s stored away for future writing. Biology led his penis, but he allowed Catholicism (and its rituals and symbolism) to lead his imagination to punishment.

Born in Flames (1983)

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Image via First Run Features

Born in Flames does not have a formal plot structure, instead it’s purely punk rock. Lizzie Borden’s docu-drama is revolutionary; it understands that for social revolutions to work, all the cells of the disenfranchised must charge the gates together, not out of complete unity but in cockroach chaos; an army of whistleblowers.

Stripped down, Born in Flames concerns a group of various groups led by women who rebel against a not-so-futuristic government. Lora Logic (of the seminal punk bands Essential Logic, X-Ray Spex, and Red Krayola) provides the theme song to the movie, which is the perfect ease into the tone because her underground “bondage up yours!” punk ethos allows Borden’s movie to exist as almost like a punk zine; gluestick smudges and white edges showing from imperfect cutouts. Fucked up and photocopied.

Born in Flames is still so prescient and relevant today, perhaps even more than the 1980s, but the decrepit state of urban areas after the Great White Flight of the 70s makes for the perfect futuristic setting. 80s NYC was so scuzzy and in need of revolution and, like it always is, it’s the artists, femme punks, queers, and people of color who made it happen. For they reach their hand into the flames when it gets too hot for the rest.

Crimes of Passion (1984)

Liquid Sky is the first of a handful of films on this list that dealt with the dual identity crisis facing many people in the affluent and excessive 1980s. But that one did it in casting the same actress as two different genders. Ken Russell’s obscene opus Crimes of Passion shows many characters engaging in double identities. Kathleen Turner’s fashion designer by day, prostitute by night (with the name China Blue) is the vessel for men to enact their socially not-accepted dormant fantasies upon. Whether it’s attempting to save her, engaging in rape fantasies, or for her most constant threat, it’s a preacher (Anthony Perkins) who snorts amyl nitrate and carries around a lethal dildo to silence his shameful desires.

This film features some of the craziest, most ribald dialogue ever put on film (sample: “If you think you’re going to get back in my panties, forget it, there’s already one asshole in there”). It’s over the top, but also a weird bloody valentine to a woman’s right to choose who she wants to be. And she’s completely in control of even the most depraved situations.