Blood Meridian
1985 · 337 pages
Scalp hunters ride the Mexican border in 1849, among them a runaway Tennessee boy and the hairless giant Judge Holden. McCarthy writes the violence in Old Testament prose and never once looks away.
★ 9.1
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1985
Showing 120 works across all media from 1985
Hounds of Love
1985
Bush built her own studio at home so nobody could interfere, then gave over an entire side to a woman drowning through one night.
★ 9.0
Back to the Future
Directed by Robert Zemeckis
1985
Screenwriting teachers use it as the worked example: every joke and every prop planted early comes back later, and the whole machine runs without a single wasted second.
★ 8.8
Ran
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
1985 · Japan
Kurosawa was seventy-five and his eyesight was failing when he made it: King Lear moved to feudal Japan, with a great battle that plays to music and nothing else.
★ 8.7
Come and See
Directed by Elem Klimov
1985 · Russia
No other war film can follow it: Klimov put a boy's face through the destruction of Belarus and let it age visibly, and nobody watches it twice lightly.
★ 8.6
Love in the Time of Cholera
1985 · 348 pages
Turned down as a young man, Florentino Ariza waits fifty-one years for the woman he loves to be widowed. García Márquez makes old age more erotic than youth.
★ 8.4
How Soon is Now?The Smiths
How Soon is Now?
1985 · From Meat Is Murder
Marr's shudder came from four Fender Twins with their tremolos fighting, and Morrissey put a lonely man in a nightclub.
★ 8.1
The Handmaid's Tale
1985 · 336 pages
In the theocracy that replaced the United States, fertile women are assigned to powerful men to bear their children. Atwood put nothing in it that had not already happened somewhere.
★ 7.7
La Di Da DiSlick Rick
La Di Da Di
1985
Two voices and no instruments at all: Doug E. Fresh's beatbox under Slick Rick's storytelling, sampled ever since.
★ 7.6
West End GirlsPet Shop Boys
West End Girls
1985
Cut twice, once for Bobby Orlando and again with Stephen Hague, Tennant half-rapping London class anxiety to number one.
★ 7.5
Take On Me
1985
Two releases flopped before the third one broke, Furuholmen's Juno-60 riff intact and a video rotoscoped over sixteen weeks.
★ 7.5
Rain Dogs
1985
Waits had Marc Ribot play guitar as though he had never been taught, and Keith Richards turns up on three tracks.
★ 7.5
Bizarre Love Triangle
1985
It missed the UK top forty, all Fairlight sequencing except Hook's bass, and now every indie disco needs it.
★ 7.5
Money for Nothing
1985 · From Brothers in Arms
Knopfler borrowed a pen in a New York appliance store to copy down a delivery man's complaints about MTV.
★ 7.4
Into the Groove
1985
Written for another singer, rebuilt with Stephen Bray for a Desperately Seeking Susan dance scene, then buried on a B-side.
★ 7.4
Brazil
Directed by Terry Gilliam
1985
The bleakest comedy ever made about paperwork: Gilliam imagined a state that tortures you politely and misfiles the forms afterward, and had to fight his own studio to release it.
★ 7.4
Everybody Wants to Rule the World
1985 · From Songs from the Big Chair
Orzabal found the shuffle alien to the band, Hughes talked him into it anyway, and America made it a number one.
★ 7.3
Shoah
Directed by Claude Lanzmann
1985 · France
Nine hours long, with no archive footage at all: Lanzmann spent eleven years getting survivors, bystanders and perpetrators to describe what they saw, standing on the actual sites.
★ 7.0
Don't You (Forget About Me)
1985
Bryan Ferry and Billy Idol passed; Simple Minds cut it reluctantly, then kept the placeholder chant that closes it.
★ 7.0
Blood Meridian; or The Evening Redness in the West · 1985
The Breakfast Club
Directed by John Hughes
1985
Five teenagers in one room for a Saturday detention, and every teen film since has been rearranging the same five: Hughes let them talk instead of doing anything.
★ 6.9
Shout (Tears for Fears)
1985 · From Songs from the Big Chair
Orzabal wrote it on a small synth as an album track; Stanley heard a worldwide smash and was right.
★ 6.9
Lonesome Dove
1985 · 858 pages
Two aging Texas Rangers drive cattle from the Rio Grande to Montana, one talking constantly and one saying nothing. McMurtry gives the whole crew interior lives, then lets the trail take them.
★ 6.9
Amusing Ourselves to Death
Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
1985 · 184 pages
Orwell feared censors, Postman writes, but Huxley feared an audience too amused to care. Television has turned news and politics into show business, and every argument about screens since has borrowed his terms.
★ 6.8
QED
The Strange Theory of Light and Matter
1985 · 192 pages
Why does a pane of glass reflect some of the light striking it? Feynman answers with arrows on paper and not one equation, handing quantum electrodynamics whole to readers who never took physics.
★ 6.7
In Between DaysThe Cure
In Between Days
1985 · From The Head on the Door
Smith's six-string bass, acoustic guitars strummed to a blur, and the Cure's sunniest song about feeling old.
★ 6.6
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
1985 · 400 pages
Two stories alternate: a man who encrypts data inside his mind, and a newcomer to a walled town reading dreams from unicorn skulls. Murakami has been returning to that architecture for forty years.
★ 6.4
Tim
1985
Tommy Ramone produced it, and the band got themselves banned from Saturday Night Live after one drunken appearance a few months later.
★ 6.3
Head Over HeelsTears for Fears
Head Over Heels
1985 · From Songs from the Big Chair
Ian Stanley wrote the motif, Orzabal added melody and words, and the chorus arrives like a door kicked open.
★ 6.3
Don't Come Around Here No More
1985 · From Southern Accents
Stewart's electric sitar, a title Stevie Nicks said out loud one night, and Petty at his strangest.
★ 6.2
How Will I Know
1985 · From Whitney Houston
A demo Janet Jackson's camp turned down, which Houston rode to number one over her cousin Dionne Warwick.
★ 6.2
Brothers in Arms
1985
The first album to sell a million copies on compact disc, and one of the first recorded digitally start to finish.
★ 6.1
Songs from the Big Chair
1985
Everybody Wants to Rule the World was written last, in a few days, and the band nearly left it off the record entirely.
★ 5.9
Conga
1985
Written after a show in Utrecht by the band's own drummer, it walked Latin percussion onto American pop radio.
★ 5.7
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
1985 · 256 pages
A music teacher reaches for his wife's head, mistaking it for his hat. Sacks gives twenty-four such patients whole inner lives, more curious about what their minds built than what was lost.
★ 5.7