Amadeus
Starring: Tom Hulce,
F Murray Abraham, Elizabeth Berridge, Simon Callow
Director: Milos Forman
The film: The 1980s was a dubious period for the art of motion picture making. But the decade that style forgot did give us Raging Bull (1980), Gandhi (1982), and Milos Forman's superlative period piece Amadeus.
Forman (One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest) was one of the leading lights of the Czech New Wave of the 60s and the last great European director to get his foot in the Hollywood door. And this, the most lavish of all his works, meant he could never look back.
Told mostly in flashback, Amadeus follows the contrasting fortunes of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Salieri, two composers vying for the favour of Emperor Joseph II (Jeffrey Jones) in 18th-century Vienna.
