The Movies of Happenstance

This month Jason Hutchens watches films from 1985 that he's never seen before, using Letterboxd ratings to uncover hidden gems. This month's selection is:

Come and See (Elem Klimov, USSR)

The Time to Live and the Time to Die (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan)

The Official Story (Luis Puenzo, Argentina)

A Zed & Two Noughts (Peter Greenaway, UK)

O-Bi, O-Ba: The End of Civilization (Piotr Szulkin, Poland)

The Black Cannon Incident (Huang Jianxin, China)

Phenomena (Dario Argento, Italy)

Enemy Mine (Wolfgang Petersen, USA)

See Jason's review scores for these eight movies on Letterboxd.

This month Jason Hutchens watches films from 1980 that he's never seen before, using Letterboxd ratings to uncover hidden gems. This month's selection is:

The Stunt Man (Richard Rush, USA) 

Out of the Blue (Dennis Hopper, USA)

Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, USA)

City of Women (Federico Fellini, Italy)

Night of the Juggler (Robert Butler, USA)

Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind (Tsui Hark, Hong Kong)

The Long Good Friday (John Mackenzie, UK)

The Ninth Configuration (William Peter Blatty, USA)

See Jason's review scores for these eight movies on Letterboxd.

Jason Hutchens explores films from 1975 using Letterboxd ratings, jumping five years each month to trace movie trends and cultural shifts. He sets the scene with the era's music, politics and Hollywood changes before hunting for lesser-known favourites. The movies this week are:

Dog Day Afternoon (Sidney Lumet, USA)

Mirror (Andrei Tarkovsky, USSR)

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, Belgium)

3 Days of the Condor (Sydney Pollack, USA)

The Travelling Players (Theo Angelopoulos, Greece)

The Day of the Locust (John Schlesinger, USA)

Nashville (Robert Altman, USA)

Manila in the Claws of Light (Lino Brocka, Philippines)

See Jason's review scores for these eight movies on Letterboxd. You may also want to check out BFI's List of the Greatest Films of All Time.

In this episode Jason launches Season 3 by exploring the movies of 1970. After setting the scene with seven era-defining songs and a brief cultural roundup (Apollo 13, Kent State, music and technology), he explains a new monthly approach: by browsing a list of all 1970 movies on Letterboxd he discovers eight movies from 1970 that he has never seen, or even heard of, to watch and review. The movies are:

Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (Elio Petri, Italy)

Le Cercle Rouge (Jean-Pierre Melville, France)

The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci, Italy)

El Topo (Alejandro Jodorowsky, Mexico)

Heroic Purgatory (Yoshishige Yoshida, Japan)

Dodeskadan (Akira Kurosawa, Japan)

A Touch of Zen (King Hu, Taiwan)

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (Dario Argento, Italy)

See Jason's review scores for these eight movies on Letterboxd. This episode mixes film discovery methods, historical context, and reviews of standout titles from the year.

This week the bingo machine selected #50, which was The Goonies. Listen to hear what we thought about it, along with news from this week in 1985. You can see the list of movies we've watched so far, and join our Discord server to chat about them. You can also access all of our previous episodes (include those of season 1, where we watched the movies of 1999). And don't forget to rewind! Seriously!