Blade Runner: Harrison Ford Takes Us Back to the Future (1982)

Ridley Scott’s vanguard science-fiction epic returns to the big screen for its 25th anniversary, digitally tweaked in hundreds of ways, most of which will be noticed only by the most pious of fanboys. Mainly, the rerelease is a good excuse to indulge once more in Scott’s iconic and highly influential vision of a future Los Angeles choked by rain, neon, and cheap pleasure palaces, where Harrison Ford’s bounty hunter trolls the godforsaken urban landscape for those renegade “replicants.” Of course, there comes a steely-eyed brunette (Sean Young), who may be a replicant herself. It has always been difficult to discuss Blade Runner—one of the few genuine masterpieces of the forlorn 1980s—without focusing on its style, and yet it is a movie where style becomes content and vice versa, as the romantic fatalism of ’40s film noir freely intermingles with the visionary imagination of Philip K. Dick.