Welcome to an exciting year-long project here at The Nerdy. 1985 was an exciting year for films giving us a lot of films that would go on to be beloved favorites and cult classics. It was also the start to a major shift in cultural and societal norms, and some of those still reverberate to this day.
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We’re going to pick and choose which movies we hit, but right now the list stands at nearly four dozen.
Yes, we’re insane, but 1985 was that great of a year for film.
The articles will come out – in most cases – on the same day the films hit theaters in 1984 so that it is their true 40th anniversary. All films are also watched again for the purposes of these reviews and are not being done from memory. In some cases, it truly will be the first time we’ve seen them.
This time around, it’s Sept. 13, 1985, and we’re off to see After Hours and Agnes of God.
After Hours
Martin Scorsese directing this is one heck of a wild ride.
Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) meets Marcy (Rosanna Arquette) in a diner where they strike up a conversation. Out of the blue that night, she invites him to a loft in SoHo, and from there Paul’s life becomes a roller coaster for the rest of the night.
Everything that can go wrong, does go wrong. While at first it feels silly, but you start to get sucked in by these characters and the absolute absurdity of what’s happening around Paul.
Interestingly, this film feels remarkably similar to Into the Night, which was released earlier the same year. Apparently, 1985 was the year of people having insane nights in major cities around the U.S. The good news is that After Hours is the better of the two and is worth checking out.
Agnes of God
In a Roman Catholic convent in Montreal, Quebec, Sister Agnes (Meg Tilly) gives birth, and the baby is found dead in her chambers. It is up to Dr. Martha Livingston (Jane Fonda) to determine if Agnes is mentally competent to stand trial, but she finds herself being dragged further and further into the mystery of what exactly happened.
Agnes of God has great performances, but the plot is just too muddled. Why does Agnes get stigmata? They spend a great deal of the movie making you think there may have been some sort of intervention by God, and the stigmata plays into that, but at the end of the film you are lead to believe she was raped by a drifter. The stigmata is then never addressed and you have no idea which story was correct.
It’s entertaining, but the second you apply any thought to it, the plot begins to rapidly unravel.
1985 Movie Reviews will return on Sept. 20, 2025, with Creator.
