This dramatic story begins with a series of powerful dramas, where a young man is confined to the house for holidays and struggles to reveal his harsh circumstances to his family, who still can not imagine the different circumstances. The young man found no solution but to tell his parents that he had AIDS, which might make things take a different turn.
11 September 1961, Chicago, Illinois, USA
February 9, 1999 in Houston, Texas, USA
30 August 1963, Lowell, Massachusetts, USA
10 April 1983, San Francisco, California, USA
February 5, 1997 in Austin, Texas, USA
December 19, 2018
Writer-director Yen Tan, expanding a same-subject short film, takes his tale slowly, letting the drama breathe and the cast essay "being" rather than "acting".
October 23, 2018
This profoundly resonant, smartly understated black-and-white film greatly benefits from more than 30 years worth of sociosexual perspective that reminds us how much has changed, yet how much else has not.
June 28, 2018
All the performances are very good (though one might ask why no one has a regional accent), with stage-trained Smith providing a center of quiet intensity.
October 26, 2018
1985 feels like a missing minor classic from the decade that preceded the rise of the so-called New Queer Cinema.
March 16, 2018
It is a haunting elegy for a generation of gay men.
December 12, 2018
It's a beautifully acted film. In the dark days of the epidemic it would surely have been impossible to make a drama so balanced, so compassionately attuned to everyone's feelings.
December 12, 2018
An immaculately drawn drama
December 13, 2018
[I] appreciate that Tan embraces complexity, flaws, and compassion when he could have ignored them for a bow-tied catharsis.
December 17, 2018
A touching film that becomes both an emotional requiem for a lost generation of gay men and a heartfelt declaration that things could only get better.
December 05, 2018
The lessons being taught in 1985 are admirable, the performances top-notch, and the filmmaking stellar.
October 25, 2018
A moving cinematic sketch of a HIV-infected man living through the height of the plague.
March 16, 2018
This is a realistic, discreet, yet exploratory film that earns its tears honestly and scrupulously.
