The best movies of the 1980s, ranked
Movies about the secret lives of teenagers were all the rage in the '80s, but only Amy Heckerling's sex comedy feels like watching teenagers actually live. Screenwriter Cameron Crowe famously went undercover at a California high school to figure out what kids of the day really wanted out of life, lending the film its attitudinal authenticity, though his findings weren't exactly groundbreaking – like young people of any generation, '80s teens wanted to get high, get laid and get to adulthood before being truly prepared for it. Regardless, it's a fabulously fun, immortally insightful time capsule, capturing a time when the shopping mall was the center of the universe and Cheap Trick ruled the world.
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Times
2 days ago
- Times
Clueless (1995) review — it's difficult to overstate the impact of this film
It's difficult to overstate the reach of this Amy Heckerling teen standard. It's a loose revamp of Jane Austen's Emma that buzzes with the kind of emphatic 'Valspeak' (Valley Girl parlance) that eventually spread beyond the cinema and helped transform the very rhythm of spoken English. And so, while Alicia Silverstone as Cher (the Emma Woodhouse to Paul Rudd's Mr Knightley) conspires to matchmake teachers and new high-school students alike, we learn that she is consistently 'like, totally' disappointed with failure. She greets an unwanted male arm around her shoulder with a wince and a baffled 'as if!' And her dyspeptic classmate Amber (Elisa Donovan) demonstrates her studied boredom with thumbs and fingers posed in the shape of a 'W' accompanied by a long-drawn-out 'what-ever!' Some of the Clueless words and phrases that didn't make it, alas? Calling an attractive woman 'a Betty'. And, infamously, describing menstruation as 'I was surfing the crimson wave'.★★★★☆12A, 97minIn cinemas from Jun 27 Times+ members can enjoy two-for-one cinema tickets at Everyman each Wednesday. Visit to find out more Follow @timesculture to read the latest reviews
The Guardian
4 days ago
- The Guardian
Clueless review – Alicia Silverstone and Brittany Murphy are class acts in 90s Jane Austen parallel
Thirty years ago, the world was swooning over Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle in the BBC's Pride and Prejudice adaptation … but all the time, the actual Jane Austen screen sensation that year was happening elsewhere in plain sight. Amy Heckerling's high school romcoming-of-age masterpiece, inspired by Austen's Emma, is now on re-release for its 30th anniversary and more than ever it feels like a complete joy, a deliciously movie-literate (and literate-literate) classic, with references to Stanley Kubrick, Oscar Wilde and William Burroughs to go with the Austen parallel. Clueless is something to compare with Bringing Up Baby and The Philadelphia Story – and Alicia Silverstone's final, tearful scene matches, and even outclasses, Julia Roberts' speech in Notting Hill about being just a girl standing in front of a boy. Like Withnail and I, it's a film which is composed entirely of quotable funny lines and for each rewatch fans could lip-sync along with the entire film. Maybe some of the material wouldn't fly now – Cher's body-image jokes ('I feel like such a heifer!') are … of their time … but what contemporary movie has this level of sustained wit and fun? Silverstone gives a lovely performance as the spoilt, yet innocent and sweet-natured not-quite-16-year-old Cher (like her friend Dionne, played by Stacey Dash, she is named after a star of the past who does infomercials). She is the daughter of a widowed, wealthy lawyer in Beverly Hills, played by the formidable Dan Hedaya, who had terrified audiences in the Coen brothers' debut Blood Simple. Cher's conceit is gently mocked, and yet we're always laughing with, not at her. Silverstone is amazingly innocent and charming and her sublimely weightless screen presence has a kind of serenity and maturity that belongs to an instinctive comedy performer. Super-popular Cher, having already played matchmaker to her two teachers Mr Hall (Wallace Shawn) and Miss Geist (Twink Caplan), decides in her high-handed and meddling way to take a new student under her wing: maladroit suburban kid Tai (Brittany Murphy). But the endlessly considerate Cher, always thinking of others in her narcissistic way, finds it poignantly difficult to find a soulmate herself, having conceived a tendresse for the beautifully dressed Christian (Justin Walker) who seems to be more interested in hanging out with other guys. The awful truth is that Cher may have feelings for her goofy, annoyingly progressive stepbrother Josh (Paul Rudd). Watched again 30 years on, it's impossible not to marvel at the fact that eerily youthful Paul Rudd really doesn't look much different now (really, it should be Rudd, not Sarah Snook, doing a stage version of The Picture of Dorian Gray). There is also, sadly, a tone of melancholy in savouring Murphy's terrific performance; she died in 2009 of drug-related issues aged just 32 and like Silverstone, she was a natural comedy player and, also like Silverstone perhaps, she never got a role as good as the one in Clueless. There is great stuff also from Breckin Meyer as stoner skater-boy Travis, with whom Tai is really in love, Donald Faison as Dionne's boyfriend Murray, Jeremy Sisto as the caddish Elton, and also Walker as the sleek gay exquisite Christian. Never was a title more misleading. This is sophisticated pleasure. Clueless is in UK cinemas from 27 June.
The Guardian
04-06-2025
- The Guardian
The Seven Year Itch at 70: a comedy about infidelity ruined by the Hays code
One of the patterns that emerges in Conversations With Wilder, a delightfully candid 1999 interview book that the director Cameron Crowe did with his film-making hero, Billy Wilder, is that Wilder tends to look more fondly on his hits than his misses. To him, commercial flops were rarely the result of audiences misunderstanding his work, but a regrettable failure on his part to connect with them. So it's notable that Wilder didn't have kind things to say about the Marilyn Monroe comedy The Seven Year Itch, a box-office sensation that's rightfully settled a few tiers below classics like Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, The Apartment and Some Like It Hot, his brilliant second go-around with Monroe. A work-for-hire job for Darryl Zanuck at 20th Century Fox, The Seven Year Itch didn't originate with Wilder, but George Axelrod's 1952 Broadway comedy about marital wanderlust, with its ping-pong between lustiness and guilt, seemed well-suited to his sensibility. But the real tension that undermines the film is the ping-pong between Monroe's five-alarm sexuality and the wet-blanket prudishness that keeps putting out the fire. Wilder and Axelrod, who also scripted, were 'straitjacketed' by the Hays code, which imposed strict limits on how far the film could go, and Wilder couldn't work around it. He called it a 'nothing picture' because censors neutered a comedy about infidelity. A comedy about mere temptation doesn't have the same pop. Seventy years later, The Seven Year Itch may not be remembered as a great movie, but it'll forever be cherished as a grate movie. Wilder sensed a scene where Monroe, in a form-fitting white dress, positions herself above a subway grate on Lexington Avenue would cause a stir, so he leaned into it, turning the shoot into a media frenzy that yielded one of the signature images of Monroe's career. It's also a prime example of the uncorked sexuality that Monroe brought to the table, which even the Hays code couldn't hope to suppress. On a date with an older, married man – the movie they see, Creature from the Black Lagoon, is much more erotic than this one – her character explains that she likes to feel the wind from passing trains under her dress. She's unashamed by the feeling. Yet shame proves to be a heavy anchor for Richard Sherman (Tom Ewell), a middle-aged paperback book publisher whose tendency to daydream about romantic encounters seems to manifest a fantasy girl come to life. After sending his wife, Helen (Evelyn Keyes), and their son off to Maine for hot summer months, Richard toys with how much he's going to let himself off the leash while he reclaims his bachelorhood. He's a good boy at first, dining at a vegetarian restaurant because 'you can't run on martinis and Hungarian goulash'. But those martinis can easily be shaken in his Manhattan apartment, and though he keeps his cigarettes under lock and key, it's only a small hassle to access them when he gets the urge. Still, there are common urges and then there's Marilyn Monroe as 'the girl', the bubbly and endlessly accommodating blonde who's moved into the place upstairs. She nearly kills Richards when a tomato plant on her balcony drops through his lounge chair, but that proves to be enough of a meet-cute to get her to come down for a drink. Before she arrives, he dreams of seducing her with cocktails and Rachmaninoff, but she proves more enticed by the lowbrow appeals of Chopsticks and dipping potato chips in champagne. They're an odd couple, but nothing seems to turn her off, including his wedding ring, and plenty turns him on, like an 'artistic picture' in a bikini she took for a magazine he has on his shelf. The title The Seven Year Itch refers to a dubious piece of psychology suggesting married men tire of their wives after seven years and start looking around for a mistress. Many of the laughs in Axelrod's script come from Richard twisting himself into knots over whether he's that type of guy or not, which the play answers one way and the movie answers another. Wilder does his best to bring Richard's tortured conscience to visual life, with sequences that toggle between fantasy and reality, creating not only a window into his thinking but also opening up what's mostly a one-room stage play. The trouble is that Ewell, who originated the role on Broadway, is a bit of a drip as a leading man. (Wilder wanted the then unknown Walter Matthau, who'd have been a terrific choice.) Virtually all the energy in The Seven Year Itch comes from Monroe, whose sexual confidence is as weirdly innocent as it is incandescent, as if she doesn't comprehend her own power. ('People keep falling desperately in love with me,' she says, as if it's a mystery she can't begin to start cracking.) Referring to her simply as 'the girl' is an icky sign of the times, as though Axelrod and Wilder can't imagine her as a woman who exists apart from Richard's imagination. But Monroe makes so singular an impression that she dwarfs the film's ostensible star, who looks one-dimensional and feckless by comparison. Wilder is right to believe the material might have thrived in an era in which infidelity was allowed to be the theme, because without it, the stakes of The Seven Year Itch are almost non-existent. Monroe should overwhelm Ewell like Barbara Stanwyck does Henry Fonda in The Lady Eve, a comedy that was also made under the code but is arousing and dangerous in a way that The Seven Year Itch never becomes. Monroe may have been the embodiment of temptation in the era, but the possibility of sex is off the table. It's an itch the film can never scratch.
