Year of the Dragon (1985)

This was intensely racist. It was also bloated and way too long. And its main character was a hateful, misogynist prick. John Lone is sort of wonderful in Year of the Dragon, though. Definitely a star. I think the thing that I just can't understand about this film is the way Thailand, Japan, Vietnam, Korea, Hong Kong, and China are all conflated by this movie. There's a great, redeemable Chinese character who gets to tell Mickey Rourke's character off – cool. But then he of course comes around to seeing things from Rourke's point of view. No thanks. This was rough going.

Heaven's Gate (1980)

Heaven's Gate, Michael Cimino's infamous follow-up to The Deer Hunter, got a bad rap, y'all. This movie is difficult, for sure, and the long first act in New England doesn't really make much sense until the second and third acts, but this film has some really great stuff in it. I especially loved the performances of Kris Kristofferson and Jeff Bridges (he's superb in this). And, of course, Isabelle Huppert is wonderful. I really enjoyed this movie, and I found myself deeply moved during the sequence when they read the names of all of the immigrant men on the kill list. This is a pretty extraordinary portrait of racism and capitalism and the way they worked together in this particular period in U.S. American history, and it's a masterfully made movie. I watched this on DVD - from the Criterion release - in its Cimino-approved three-and-a-half-hour version.