10. Sophie's Choice (Pakula, 1982) [LE]

One of the few movies of any decade to successfully tell two stories at once, Sophie's Choice dances between a narrative you'd love to be a part of and a narrative you'd never want to touch with a ten foot pole.

The first narrative, the lovely one, involves a young writer named Stingo (Peter MacNichol) who moves to Brooklyn around 1948 in the hopes of writing his first novel, meeting eccentric New Yorkers, and finding the taker of his virginity. He probably gets more than he bargained for in Nathan (a young Kevin Kline) and Sophie (the luminous Meryl Streep), the world's most emotionally extreme couple. Nathan randomly veers between two personas: greatest guy you'd ever want to meet or verbally abusive psychotic. And Sophie? Well, Sophie's just a merry ol' exile from Nazi Germany.

Yeah, Sophie's got some baggage for you. But although her tale is dark, the telling of it strangely life-affirming. To see her recount the horrors of World War II while reclining by the sunny windowside of a Brooklyn attic suggests the ways in which a climate of all-pervasive misery can sometimes give way to a world of beauty. But can that world ever truly be Sophie's, or is it destined to be only within the youthful, American grasp of Stingo, unstained by the traumas of Europe?

Sophie's Choice is the rare 1980s movie that not only gives you the kind of passionate, intelligent characters you fantasize about meeting someday, but places them in an ambitious narrative that never hints at the direction it's going to take. Life Sophie herself, Sophie's Choice is a 1970s movie in exile...in the 1980s.

And the titular "choice"? Well, let's just say it's not between Beta or VHS.