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.

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 1985 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 Dec. 27, 1985, and we’re off to see Murphy’s Romance, Revolution, and The Trip to Bountiful.

Murphy’s Romance

It should be illegal for people to have this much chemistry.

Emma Moriarty (Sally Field) moves to a small Arizona town with her son to try to make a living by training and boarding horses. There she meets Murphy Jones (James Garner), the town’s lone pharmacist. Despite a massive age difference, the two find themselves drawn closer and closer to one another, even though they’re the seemingly last two people to realize it.

Field and Gerner have an undeniable chemistry in this film. They play off one another so naturally. The script, while not perfect, also shows a lot of restraint in how it plays out the budding romance, seeming to know when exactly to hit the accelerator and slow down once again to let everyone settle into their shifting rhythms.

Well acted and endlessly charming.

Revolution

I can not imagine a less fun way to experience the Revolutionary War.

Fur Trader Tom Dobb (Al Pacino) finds himself thrust into the Revolutionary War when his boat is conscripted into the war, and his son accidentally joins the army. What follows is several years of following Tom and his son throughout the war while also occasionally running into Daisy McConnahay (Nastassja Kinski), the idealistic daughter of a wealthy merchant. Though their encounters are brief, Daisy and Tom find themselves falling for one another.

Revolution is one of those films that claims its run time is 2 hours and 4 minutes, but around hour 18, I wondered when my misery would end. The film is excruciatingly boring and filled with numerous scenes that go absolutely nowhere and serve no purpose.

And how anyone thought Pacino and Kinski were right for these roles is beyond me.

An incredibly easy one to say you can pass on.

The Trip to Bountiful

It only seems fitting that I close out the year with a film that is all about connecting with your past.

Carrie Watts (Geraldine Page) has lived with her son and his wife for 15 years, and she is desperate to visit her childhood home in Bountiful. She finally sneaks out one day and makes her way to a town only a few miles away when her son finally has the sheriff catch up with her to bring her back home. She finally is able to talk the sheriff into taking her to the town so she can see what she presumes is the last time.

Based on a play of the same name, it’s a touching story that allows Page to shine, which led to her winning an Academy Award. It’s a sweet, quiet character study that’s worth a watch, but make sure to keep your expectations in line with a quiet film about someone enjoying the final days of their life.

1986 Movie Reviews will debut on Jan. 3, 2026, with Head Office.

While the swirl of chatter around Travis Kelce on Christmas Day was on whether he plans to retire at the end of the season, the 11-time Pro Bowl tight end quietly moved up to No. 9 on the NFL all-time receiving list.

Kelce’s fifth and last catch in the Kansas City Chiefs’ 20-13 loss to the Denver Broncos was No. 1,077, pushing him past Anquan Boldin. With two more receptions in the Chiefs’ regular-season finale, Kelce will surpass Terrell Owens in the No. 8 spot.

Statistics were seemingly the last thing on Kelce’s mind as he walked off the Arrowhead Stadium field on Thursday, perhaps for the last time. The Chiefs finish the season on the road next week against the Las Vegas Raiders.

Kelce’s recent years are inextricably linked to his fiance Taylor Swift. Was this the last time the music megastar would grace the Kelce family luxury suite to watch her beau rack up the receptions? (If so, let the record show that Swift wore a red bomber jacket from the Frankie Shop.)

Kelce, 36, admitted he was feeling reflective afterward.

“A whole lot of emotions,” he told reporters. “You’ve got everybody in the world watching you. You get to go out there with the young guys on prime-time television. Young guys getting an opportunity to taste what this NFL life is like.”

For Kelce, the NFL life has been fulfilling. He’s won three Super Bowls and is all but certain to be inducted into the Hall of Fame. And he’s played his entire 13-year career with the Chiefs.

So while he sorted through emotions and memories after the game, he basked in the adulation beforehand.

“You only get a few of those where you get to stand there and appreciate 70,000 Chiefs fans cheering for you,” he explained. “I always embrace that moment.

“You feel the generations of happiness and the love [the fans] have. It’s a beautiful thing, man.”

For a decade, Kelce was a regional sports figure, revered in the Midwest as a hard-nosed, consistent producer on the field. His profile began to change ahead of the 2022 season when he and his brother, Jason, launched an immediately popular podcast, “New Heights.”

Kelce and Swift began dating ahead of the 2023 season, and a year later, the Kelce brothers signed a three-year, $100-million podcast deal with Amazon’s Wondery. Then in August, Kelce and Swift announced their engagement.

Tight ends, with their three-point stances and proximity to tackles and guards, traditionally don’t seek or attract attention. But Kelce is now a full-fledged national celebrity.

Just don’t allow that to obscure his numbers. Kelce has 73 catches for 839 yards in 2025, putting him alongside Jerry Rice as the only players in NFL history to eclipse the 800‐yards receiving mark in 12 consecutive seasons. Kelce also is the only tight end to exceed 90 catches for seven seasons in a row, a streak that will end this year.

Rice, the former San Francisco 49ers great, is the NFL‘s all-time leading receiver with 1,549 catches. Larry Fitzgerald is next with 1,432. Then come the only tight ends with more catches than Kelce: Tony Gonzalez (1,325) and Jason Witten (1,228).

Should Kelce decide to play another season, he almost certainly would climb to No. 5, passing Marvin Harrison (1,102), Cris Carter (1,101) and Tim Brown (1,094) in addition to Owens.

Kelce may have already decided whether this is the right time to retire. He just isn’t ready to say so, indicating he will let the Chiefs know soon after the season ends.

“I’ll let that be a decision I’ll make with my family, friends and the Chiefs organization when the time comes,” he said.

Timothée Chalamet has been acting a bit strangely lately. It started last year, when he won the SAG Award for A Complete Unknown and said in his acceptance speech that he wasn’t just aiming to be good, but wanted to be one of the all-time greats. This behavior continued during his press tour for Josh Safdie’s ping pong odyssey, Marty Supreme. “I’m doing top-level shit,” he said during one interview. “It’s been seven, eight years I’ve been handing in top-of-the-line performances.”

There is something off-putting about this level of bravado and ambition especially when it’s applied to an art form which isn’t—or at least shouldn’t be—about scoring wins and besting your competition. On the other hand, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit it was kind of refreshing, too. False humility is as bad—hell, it’s worse—than Chalamet’s WWE-style boasting. The actors who pretend to rise above it all, the ones who say, “Oh gosh, I didn’t even realize I got an Oscar nomination; I was in my garden when I got the call from my manager”—truly work my nerves. (Girl, please. You were glued to your TV surrounded by your publicist, your dietician, and your glam squad.)

That said, at some point, I began to wonder if what Chalamet was doing was merely schtick. He’s proven himself to be an incredible self-promoter—remember when he turned up to the Timothée Chalamet Look-a-Like Contest? (He lost.) Could all of this bragging and grandstanding be some sort of meta promotion for the film? Might he be the first actor to take The Method all the way through the press tour?

I think the answer is yes and no—which is possibly what makes Chalamet the perfect actor to depict Josh Safdie’s patented brand of manic New York city hustler.

In a way, Chalamet has always been this nervy, hopped up kid from Manhattan. He’s street smart, like all New York kids (yes, even the privileged ones) and he absorbed a lot of New York hustle culture, which is all about perpetual motion and grandstanding and faking it till you make it.

This is Josh Safdie’s first film made separately from his brother, Benny (who made some waves of his own this year with the more conventional sports biopic, The Smashing Machine) but it feels exactly like the brothers’ early work, Good Time and Uncut Gems.

Those films were about strivers and con artists who were also kind of losers. In my capsule review of Uncut Gems, in which Adam Sandler plays a diamond broker who is addicted to gambling, I said: “It’s honestly a nightmare—a nervous breakdown of a movie that never allows you to catch your breath….The Safdie brothers film [Sandler] like a shark that needs to keep moving to survive.”

I honestly could have cut and pasted that review for Marty Supreme, but there are a couple of key differences. For one, it takes place in post-war Manhattan, beautifully and painstakingly recreated by master production designer Jack Fisk. And Marty Mauser (loosely based on real ping-pong legend, Marty Reisman) actually is talented. He is one of the best ping pong players in the world, if not the very best, as he’ll tell anyone within earshot.

When the film starts, he’s peddling loafers and pumps at his uncle’s shoe store. Of course, he’s a good sales person, too—he knows how to lay on the charm. His uncle just wants to promote Marty to manager and be done with it, but Marty explains that he’s only working there to raise money to compete in the upcoming British Open. Marty’s mother (Fran Drescher) also wants him to stop pursuing this ridiculous table tennis dream and settle down like a normal Jewish son. She keeps faking a debilitating illness over the phone in an attempt to get him to come home from whatever tournament he’s playing in. (You can’t con a conman—he never buys it.)

Marty has a girlfriend, of sorts, named Rachel (Odessa A’zion), who is married to a dullard named Ira (Emory Cohen). In the first scene, she and Marty have a quickie in the supply closet and she gets pregnant—a detail that will animate much of the film.

Marty never has enough money to get where he wants, he’s always scheming and stealing and hustling—but he’s monomaniacal. It’s all about ping pong. Even sex and love are secondary to the game he’s obsessed with. (When Rachel tells him she’s pregnant he makes it clear he wants no part of raising a kid.)

I never thought I’d be writing this phrase, but I wish the film had even more ping-pong scenes. Whether he’s at a tournament or hustling some backroom players in a bowling alley with his buddy Wally (Tyler the Creator)—it’s a joy to watch Marty play. Ping-pong players are marvels of speed, hand-eye coordination, and leaping ability and when Marty’s on his game, it’s electrifying. (After months of rigorous training, Chalamet performed all the table tennis scenes himself, without a body double. Top level shit, you might say.) Marty is obnoxious, of course, when he plays—shouting, cursing, crowing—but he’s gracious when he wins, which is most of the time, wrapping his opponent in a bear hug. However, at the London Open, he finally meets his match, a steely-eyed Japanese player named Koto Endo (Koto Kowaguchi) who surprises Marty with his thickly foamed paddle and lightning fast reflexes. (Unsurprisingly, Marty is also a menace when he loses, cursing at the refs and falsely calling out Endo for cheating.)

While in London, staying at a fancy hotel he can’t afford (he charged it to the International Tennis Table Federation, against their express objections), he lays eyes on aging movie star Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow) who’s in town to do a play, and decides to pursue her, just because. He does so with the same dogged determination and unearned confidence with which he does everything else. Somehow it works and they become lovers.

Kay is married to a wealthy businessman named Milton Rockwell, played by Kevin O’Leary of Shark Tank fame. (I confess I spent the entire film trying to figure out what movies I’d seen this excellent actor in before—was he in The Irishman? A season of The White Lotus? It was a bit of a head slapper when I finally googled him.) Rockwell offers to sponsor Marty but he’s the kind of man who likes to lord his wealth and privilege over the little guy—and he’s a sadist, as he proves in one particularly memorable scene.

One of the other major plot points involves a gangster’s German Shepherd that Marty has somehow managed to lose—and it’s not clear who will kill Marty first, the dog, the dog’s new gun-toting farmer owner (Penn Jillette, in an amusing cameo), or the gangster himself.

Some have argued that Marty is an asshole and that his quasi-redemption at the end of the film is unearned, but I don’t see it that way. I think Marty is part asshole, part mensch (classic example: He steals a chunk of an Egyptian pyramid…to give to his mother as a gift). His Jewish family, still traumatized by the Holocaust, has lots of love and lots of tsuris—just like Marty himself. Note how Marty always offers a sincere “I love you,” as he rushes out of any room.

In case I wasn’t clear above, Chalamet is fantastic in this role. It may very well be his best work yet, in a career filled with excellent performances. You could make the case that Safdie’s film allowed him to evolve into his purest form—the antsy, quicksilver street hustler who was in there all along.

“I feel like the gift of my life is to focus on this acting thing the way Marty Mauser is locked in on ping pong,” he recently told Vanity Fair.

Mission accomplished, Timothée. Mission accomplished.