Raging Bull
Directed by Martin Scorsese
1980
Scorsese shot boxing as penance rather than sport, and audiences come out feeling bruised: De Niro's jealousy destroys everyone near him, in the blackest black and white imaginable.
★ 9.6
Browse by time · decade
1980s
1980 – 1989
Showing 128 films from the 1980s
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Directed by Steven Spielberg
1981
Every adventure film since is measured against it: Spielberg and Lucas built a machine of chases and near misses so efficient that forty years of imitation have not worn it out.
★ 9.5
Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back
Directed by Irvin Kershner
1980
Everyone learned how to make a sequel from this: the pressure builds for two hours, the tone stays darker than anyone expected, and one line near the close rearranged a generation's childhood.
★ 9.4
The Shining
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
1980
Whole documentaries exist about what this film means: Kubrick threw out most of King's novel, sent a Steadicam gliding down those corridors, and left a dread nobody can explain away.
★ 9.2
Blade Runner
Directed by Ridley Scott
1982
It flopped, then quietly redesigned the future: every rainy neon city of the last forty years is borrowing from Ridley Scott, and the mood still outlasts the plot.
★ 9.2
Back to the Future
Directed by Robert Zemeckis
1985
Screenwriting teachers use it as the worked example: every joke and every prop planted early comes back later, and the whole machine runs without a single wasted second.
★ 8.8
ET the Extra-Terrestrial
Directed by Steven Spielberg
1982
Highest grossing film in the world for a decade, and it earns every cent: Spielberg shot at child height so the adults are legs and voices, and wrecks entire cinemas.
★ 8.8
Ran
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
1985 · Japan
Kurosawa was seventy-five and his eyesight was failing when he made it: King Lear moved to feudal Japan, with a great battle that plays to music and nothing else.
★ 8.7
Aliens
Directed by James Cameron
1986
Almost no sequel changes genre and survives it: Cameron turned Scott's haunted house into a war picture, and an action performance drew a rare Academy Award nomination.
★ 8.6
Come and See
Directed by Elem Klimov
1985 · Russia
No other war film can follow it: Klimov put a boy's face through the destruction of Belarus and let it age visibly, and nobody watches it twice lightly.
★ 8.6
Grave of the Fireflies
Directed by Isao Takahata
1988 · Japan
Nobody recommends this one lightly: Takahata put two children through the last months of the war in Japan, and being animated makes it harder to bear, not easier.
★ 8.4
Full Metal Jacket
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
1987
The first half is the most quoted boot camp ever filmed: Kubrick found a real Marine drill instructor, let him write half his own material, and made basic training terrifying.
★ 8.3
My Neighbor Totoro
Directed by Hayao Miyazaki
1988 · Japan
Children's films almost never dare to have no villain: Miyazaki made eighty minutes of pure safety out of two sisters and a forest spirit, and it became Ghibli's emblem.
★ 8.2
Do the Right Thing
Directed by Spike Lee
1989
No American film has been braver about refusing to resolve: one Brooklyn block on the hottest day of the year, and Lee will not tell you who was right.
★ 8.2
Fanny & Alexander
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
1982 · Sweden
Bergman meant it as his farewell to cinema and made it the warmest thing he ever did: five hours in its full version, of Christmas light, ghosts, cruelty and childhood.
★ 8.1
Das Boot
Directed by Wolfgang Petersen
1981 · Germany
No war film has ever been this claustrophobic: Petersen ran a camera the length of a U-boat again and again until the steel walls start pressing in on you.
★ 8.1
Die Hard
Directed by John McTiernan
1988
Hollywood spent the next decade pitching films as Die Hard on a boat, a bus, a plane: McTiernan built the action machine everyone has been copying since 1988.
★ 8.0
Blue Velvet
Directed by David Lynch
1986
Lynch invented his own genre here and the word Lynchian dates from it: a severed ear in a field leads into the underside of an ordinary American town.
★ 8.0
Once Upon a Time in America
Directed by Sergio Leone
1984
American distributors cut ninety minutes out of it and destroyed the reviews: restored to full length, Leone's fifty-year gangster elegy drifts between decades like an opium dream.
★ 7.9
The Terminator
Directed by James Cameron
1984
Cameron made it for six million dollars and launched two careers and a franchise: a machine that cannot be bargained with, cannot be reasoned with, and absolutely will not stop.
★ 7.9