The Best Eighties Films, Year By Year

The 32 Best American Movies of the 1980s, Year By YearIt was the golden age of studio blockbusters, but it also gave us everything from Back to the Future to Blue Velvet.Universal/Everett CollectionOur list of the best eighties films begins below. Click here to read our list of the best nineties movies.Quentin Tarantino has semi-famously insisted that the 1980s represent a nadir for Hollywood filmmaking, his least favorite decade in the medium’s history, a time of Hollywood studios digging into corporate cowardice as part of a post-’70s auteurism hangover. Even if you don’t agree with his assessment, it’s admittedly bracing to hear an older guy speak so disparagingly about an era of movies that plenty of Gen-Xers romanticize as the last time that Things Were Good, whether it’s comedies starring the “right” Saturday Night Live guys (Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy; none of those gross girls from later ones!), action movies with the proper level of machismo (sky-high), or kids’ adventure/fantasy movies that fulfill the highest of quality standards (coming out when whoever likes them was a kid themselves). Honestly, it’s hard to argue Tarantino’s point that, if you’re comparing decades, the ‘80s wilt in comparison to most others, not least the ‘70s and ‘90s that surround it (though—and I expect QT might agree—from a studio-filmmaking perspective, the 2020s might give it a wilt for its money).And yet! Some of those SNL-related comedies, high-octane action movies, and kiddie fantasies really are all-timers, because there were some things that Hollywood studios were doing right in those years (granted, an especially easy call to make when you’re not living through cinematic offerings like Short Circuit, Firestarter, or Hot to Trot). There’s some genuine vision, subversion, and emotion to be found amidst the stereotypical excess, especially in the decade’s more genre-inflected offerings. This year-by-year roundup of the best American movies of the ‘80s leans into those properties—which is not to say that more traditional classics like The Verdict, Tootsie, or Hannah and Her Sisters, or later reclamations like The Color of Money or Manhunter aren’t worthy. Expand this list out to 50, and they’d probably all be there. Instead, let’s take a tour through the best eighties films made in the U.S., with one lead selection for each year, plus plenty of bonus selections that aren’t so easily classified.Best Satirical Comedy: Airplane! (1980)Paramount/Everett CollectionSee also: This Is Spinal Tap (1984)A lot of great Reagan-era satire was tucked into genre movies of the 1980s, while some of the broader, less commentary-minded comedies featured plenty of genre elements; seemingly part of the appeal of Ghostbusters or Beverly Hills Cop was seeing your Saturday Night Live pals in newly big-budget contexts. I’ll go to bat for Ghostbusters as a near-miraculous attitude comedy; less so for the star performance in search of a movie that is Beverly Hills Cop. But moreover, two of the best outright comedies of the ‘80s were more pop-culturally minded than, say, the sly satire of They Live or RoboCop, while also having more on their minds than the snobs-v-slobs leftovers of Caddyshack (or the snide-v-slobs dynamics of Fletch). Airplane! may not be quite as pointed as the Mel Brooks spoofs of the 1970s that predated it, but in terms of comic form, it’s just about perfect: the pinnacle of a gag-a-minute style that uses a familiar framework (in this case, the Airport disaster series of the 1970s, though it takes its actual plotting from the older C-movie Zero Hour!) to smash and grab all manner of cultural cliches, from specific touchstones (Saturday Night Fever’s dance numbers) to boilerplate dialogue that could have appeared in 100 other movies. This Is Spinal Tap, meanwhile, takes on the rock-doc in a slightly more Mel Brooksian mode; less madcap to be sure, and far more deadpan, but a lovingly meticulous recreation of a familiar genre – twice over, actually, because Rob Reiner, Christopher Guest, Harry Shearer, and Michael KcKean were creating heavy-metal pomposity from scratch, too.Best Neo-Noir: Blow Out (1981)BLOW OUT, John Travolta, 1981, (c) Filmways/courtesy Everett CollectionFilmways/Everett CollectionSee also: Thief (1981)There’s a wealth of strong Brian De Palma thrillers to choose from in the ‘80s, whether you prefer them accessibly mainstream (The Untouchables), sleazy (Body Double), or downright problematic (Dressed to Kill). But for a decade where studios sought to maximize the gifts of former-vanguard blockbuster-makers, including some who logged time making B-movies for Roger Corman, it feels particularly fitting to select Blow Out, a thriller about the mechanics of filmmaking bleeding over into real life when a sound engineer (John Travolta) recording effects in the field thinks he may have captured evidence of an assassination. Like a lot of ‘80s classics, the film remixes several cultural touchstones from previous decades, whether political (the JFK assassination) or cinematic (Blowup; The Conversation); the result is one of De Palma’s best, with Hitchcockian thrills chased by grimly tragic ironies. Thief, meanwhile, is considerably more earnest, with Michael Mann introducing a more hypnotic, sometimes painterly visual sensibility to a relatively straightforward criminal-trying-to-get-out narrative. The commentary isn’t quite as acid as De Palma’s, but Mann still includes a sharp critique of capitalism and labor at the dawn of the Reagan era.Best Family Fantasy: E.T. (1982)Universal/Everett CollectionSee also: The Dark Crystal (1982)There were a lot of big-budget fantasy movies in the wake of Star Wars throughout the 1980s, many of them impressive on some level, whether costumes or sets or other production value, and somewhat turgid when actually sitting down and experiencing them straight through. Naturally, George Lucas’s pal Steven Spielberg had been instincts than that, inverting a standard family-fantasy-movie trope (the normal human kid traveling to a fantastical land, Wizard of Oz-style) so that the visitor to a strange land is also the fantastical creature: E.T., a little lost alien befriended by Elliott (Henry Thomas), a lonely kid dealing with the aftermath of his parents’ divorce. Spielberg weaves transporting fantasy from suburban ingredients, instilling genuine awe with a shot of a child’s bicycle in silhouette as it flies past the moon. If you do go in for something more otherworldly, though, it’s hard to beat The Dark Crystal—not just in the 1980s, but for the history of American cinema more broadly. Yes, the story is largely bits and pieces of familiar fantasy lore, but the all-puppet world of this movie is astonishing, beautiful, and, at times, nightmare-inducing.Best Non-Comedy: The King of Comedy (1983)20th Century Fox/Everett CollectionSee also: Platoon (1986); Blue Velvet (1986)Maybe it’s a personal taste thing, but many of the vaunted American dramas— your Best Picture winners, your cultural phenoms— of the 1980s pale, for me, against a whole lot of movies that could be classified as something else, even if it’s not entirely sure what. The King of Comedy, for example, is a comedy of sorts, but not exactly in the way that you’d put it up against, like, National Lampoon’s Vacation or Caddyshack. (I was going to joke about a misbegotten The King of Comedy II with multiple key cast members missing and the tone imitative yet all wrong, and then I remembered: Joker, truly the Caddyshack II of psychological comic thrillers.) Even more than famous Best Picture loser Raging Bull, it feels like a signal of Martin Scorsese, one of America’s greatest filmmakers, becoming out of step with the direction of Hollywood at large as the auteur-friendly 1970s come to an end. (Scorsese himself reportedly felt uneasy about King of Comedy, too, a real feat of sorts.) David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, too, is a movie that’s not quite overtly comic enough to qualify as a comedy, but was obviously too strange, funny, and disturbing for a lot of audiences to get on board with it as a serious drama. The Oscar-winning Platoon is obviously more of a traditional drama, but it has a Vietnam War-appropriate unruliness to it that sets it apart from the other awards darlings of the era. (Sorry, Out of Africa.)Best Horror: A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)New Line Cinema/Everett CollectionSee also: Poltergeist (1982)There were plenty of American suburbs going up throughout the middle of the 20th century, but that’s not necessarily where the seminal works of horror were taking place. Those that weren’t Universal Monster-style period pieces—the Ed Gein-inspired proto-slashers like Psycho and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre—were set on the outskirts of society. John Carpenter brought slashers closer to small-town home with Halloween, and one of the very best horror movies of the following decade went both more and less expansive. Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street is set in a suburban Ohio town, but the really scary stuff takes place in the heads of local teenagers, all haunted by the same crispy figure, a product of their parents’ murderous vigilante justice. It’s not just that the suburbs conceal darker secrets, as in Blue Velvet, but that even those not privy to the secrets will find their subconscious minds haunted and maybe destroyed – about as potent a portrait of suburban terror as I can think of. No surprise that Steven Spielberg —writing and producing, but not directing; put some respect on Tobe Hooper’s name—got in on the suburban-horror action, too, with Poltergeist, where a planned community has been built on literal bodies.Best Comic Fantasy: Back to the Future (1985)Universal/Everett CollectionSee also: Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988); Ghostbusters (1984); Beetlejuice (1988); Back to the Future Part II (1989)As much as it pains me to hand anything to the Funko Pop nostalgists—deny them! Deny them everything they’ve ever wanted!—this is exactly where American big-studio cinema excelled in the 1980s: Comic fantasies from somewhat satirically minded Boomer filmmakers like Robert Zemeckis and Tim Burton, looking back on midcentury American culture with differing mixtures of affection and playful disdain. (OK, Ghostbusters is really just a Reagan-compatible goof, albeit a masterful one; maybe chalk that up to Ivan Reitman, b. 1946, occupying the outer limits of the Boomer era.) Among these comic fantasies, the original Back to the Future stands out not just for the perfection of its screenplay (though a better-tuned contraption may not exist in Hollywood), but because it more cleverly universalizes the cycles of social change, as teenage Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) is confronted with parents equally full of youthful promise and reckless stupidity. Unlike Zemeckis himself, none of the major characters are actually Boomers at all; McFly, as a 1985 teenager, is solidly Gen-X, while the mismatched parents he has to nudge back together would actually hail from the Silent Generation. Maybe that’s what helps the movie see both sides of that divide with such ingenious clarity. Zemeckis would get more technically ambitious with Who Framed Roger Rabbit and more narratively twisted with Back to the Future Part II, but the original Back to the Future is just cockeyed enough about the materialistic triumphs Marty is able to gift his family through time-travel meddling to make it both an appealing fantasy and a classic comedy.Best Musical (and Creature Feature): Little Shop of Horrors (1986)Warner Bros/Everett CollectionSee also: The Fly (1986); Aliens (1986)1986 was surely the best creature-movie year of the decade; was it also the best creature-movie of all time? It’s hard to argue with the range here, all cleverly drawn from other decades: David Cronenberg remade the 1950s sci-fi picture The Fly to reflect his body-horror sensibilities, entwining a transforming and decaying human body with a tragic love story, while James Cameron firebombed his way through a pluralized expansion of Ridley Scott’s 1979 classic Alien to make perhaps the definitive more-really-is-more sequel. Strangest of all, also among the year’s best creature fare was arguably the best American movie musical of the decade: Little Shop of Horrors, adapted from the Howard Ashman/Alan Menken Off-Broadway show, itself inspired by a killer-plant quickie-cheapie Roger Corman picture from the 1960s. (Yes, more recontextualization of those halcyon years of Boomer culture.) A ravenous alien plant threatens to consume all of life on Earth, enabled by a meek loser who gets his first taste of social status by showing it off. That it somehow ekes out a movie-only happy ending is a tribute to the power of cinema to generate empathy, the power of Ashman-Menken songs to create certain audience expectations, and the power of go-go ‘80s optimism (at least wherever Rick Moranis was involved).Best Action Lunacy: RoboCop (1987)Orion Pictures Corp/Everett CollectionSee also: Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981); Return of the Jedi (1983); Predator (1987); Die Hard (1988)Here’s the other area where the big studios were kicking ass in the 1980s: uh, kicking ass. It’s important, though, to distinguish between enjoyable Arnold-and-Sly romps like Commando and truly masterful action cinema that follows more closely in the tracks of The Road Warrior (which would definitely make this list if it were American-made, rather than Australian). For whatever reason, similarly fantastical elements seem to help push pure-action cinema to new heights, with the pointed exception of Die Hard. Most purely and satisfyingly ‘80s is the darkly hilarious satire and carnage of RoboCop—not because it features an archetypal muscleman, but because of its dystopian extrapolation of Reaganomics, featuring the simultaneous corporatization and militarization of the police. In true Paul Verhoeven fashion, the movie makes its satirical points while also kicking ass as a genre piece, to the point where it spawned sequels, comics, an animated series, and a toyline. Hilariously, it’s the most gruesome and adult-oriented of the five movies mentioned in this category, in addition to being the only one besides Star Wars to inspire a kids’ cartoon.Best Neo-Screwball Farce: A Fish Called Wanda (1988)Everett CollectionSee also: Raising Arizona (1987); Something Wild (1986)OK, here’s a minor fudge, but a thematically appropriate one: A Fish Called Wanda had American studio backing, but it’s also unmistakably British in origin, given its director/co-writer Charles Crichton and star/co-writer John Cleese. But it’s precisely the alchemy of its Brits-and-Yanks mismatching (Jamie Lee Curtis and Kevin Kline repping the Americans, with Cleese and fellow Monty Python member Michael Palin showing up for the U.K.) that makes it stand out as perhaps the single funniest movie of the decade. Curtis, Kline, and Palin are three-quarters of a criminal gang in pursuit of hidden loot, which they hope they can extract from their jailed compatriot if Wanda (Curtis) seduces uptight barrister Archie Leech (Cleese). It’s a good deal more vulgar, venal, and nasty than most screwball farces of the ‘30s and ‘40s—there’s a running gag involving little dogs getting accidentally killed by animal-lover Palin —but Kline in particular gives a stylized master class in playing a spiritually ugly American. I love plenty of ramshackle comedies, but the sheer skill of the comic plotting in A Fish Called Wanda is awe-inspiring, a turbo-charged version of its inspirations. Less classically straight-comedy filmmakers also took influence from screwball in the late ‘80s: Something Wild is like a noirish Bringing Up Baby, which also could serve as an alternate title for Raising Arizona, though that sophomore feature from Joel and Ethan Coen owes as much to the screwballs’ animated counterpart: Looney Tunes.Best Romance and Coming-of-Age: Say Anything… (1989)20th Century Fox/Everett CollectionSee also: When Harry Met Sally (1989); Heathers (1989); Stand By Me (1986)When Harry Met Sally is deservedly held up as an epochal romantic comedy, to the point where a lot of rom-com history barely acknowledges the 60 years’ worth of movies that preceded it. But there is definitely something to the idea of 1989 as an inflection point for both rom-coms, growing to their full power with Nora Ephron and Rob Reiner’s beloved, sentimental glow-up of Woody Allen and classic screwball, and teen movies, breaking free from the John Hughes influence with variations that far outclass and outsmart his actual (and obviously intensely influential) contributions to the subgenre, most bracingly with the brilliantly black Heathers. The cross-section of these two movements: Say Anything…, Cameron Crowe’s debut as a writer-director, which manages to be a nuanced coming-of-age story for “Diane Court whoa” (Ione Skye) and a pining-romantic-gesture story for Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack), the affable misfit who tries to make his crush on the class brain into a post-graduation reality. Any given character in Heathers would roll their eyes, but the sheer care Crowe puts into his character could make almost any filmmaker look downright cruel by comparison – which makes it all the more remarkable how damn funny Say Anything… is.Best End of an Era: Do the Right Thing (1989)Universal/Everett CollectionSpike Lee released three feature films in the 1980s, so it’s not as if his true origins feel more of the ’90s, like Steven Soderbergh (whose feature debut came out a summer month or so after Do the Right Thing). But as his budgets and ambitions grew throughout the following decade, his importance in the American cinema became ever clearer. I’m not even completely certain Do the Right Thing is his best film; Malcolm X, 25th Hour, and He Got Game are all stiff competition. But it’s remarkable, rewatching Do the Right Thing today, how avoidant it is of totally-’80s syndrome; it has the energy, presentational style, and timelessness of great theater. That doesn’t make it any less cinematic, mind; Lee’s day-in-the-life of a sweltering Brooklyn block pops with as much movement and color as ever. But it’s a different and arguably more vibrant form of mid-century-informed maximalism than what powered so much of the decade’s previous offerings, and feels, even at its least comforting, generous in offering a primer on what might be coming next.Jesse Hassenger is a contributing writer for GQ covering movies, television, and popular culture. His other work as a critic currently appears at Paste Magazine, where he is the associate film editor, as well as the A.V. Club, Decider, The Daily Beast, The Guardian, and Vulture, among others. Past publications ... Read More