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
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1980
Showing 103 works across all media from 1980
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
Once in a LifetimeTalking Heads
Once in a Lifetime
1980 · From Remain in Light
Byrne borrowed a preacher's cadence, Eno hummed the chorus melody, and the band looped its own jams like samplers.
★ 9.0
Love Will Tear Us Apart
1980
The title flips Captain and Tennille into its opposite, and the single arrived a month after Curtis's death.
★ 8.9
Remain in Light
1980
Most of it is built on a single chord that never changes, with the interest coming entirely from layers of interlocking rhythm.
★ 8.8
Life and Fate
1980 · 896 pages
During the siege of Stalingrad, a Soviet physicist receives his mother's last letter from a Nazi ghetto. Grossman wrote the war at Tolstoy's scale and said plainly that both tyrannies were one thing.
★ 8.7
Back in Black
1980
Their singer had died five months earlier. They hired Brian Johnson, put out a record in an all-black sleeve, and sold fifty million.
★ 8.6
Back in Black
1980 · From Back in Black
Johnson was told the Bon Scott tribute could not be morbid, so he wrote a celebration over Angus Young's riff.
★ 8.6
Redemption SongBob Marley and the Wailers
Redemption Song
1980 · From Uprising
A single voice and acoustic guitar close Uprising, with a line lifted from Marcus Garvey and Marley already ill.
★ 8.5
Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back · 1980
He Stopped Loving Her Today
1980
Jones thought nobody would play something so morbid; Sherrill spent eighteen months coaxing the vocal onto tape.
★ 8.3
Airplane!
Directed by David Zucker and Jim Abrahams
1980
It fires jokes at a rate almost nothing before it attempted and lands most of them: the trick was casting dramatic actors and telling them to play everything straight.
★ 7.8
No. Try not. Do...or do not. There is no try.
Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back · 1980
The Name of the Rose
1980 · 579 pages
Monks are dying at an Italian abbey in 1327, the library is a labyrinth no one may enter, and a Franciscan detective and his novice go in. Eco made medieval theology a thriller.
★ 7.7
You Shook Me All Night Long
1980 · From Back in Black
Recorded at Compass Point in Nassau with Mutt Lange, Johnson's first single, and a riff that swings rather than pounds.
★ 7.7
Another One Bites the Dust
1980 · From Greatest Hits
Deacon's bassline owes Chic, Michael Jackson talked them into releasing it, and Queen landed their biggest-selling single.
★ 7.7
9 to 5
1980 · From 9 to 5 and Odd Jobs
Parton played the typewriter part on her acrylic fingernails, credited on the album, then took it to number one.
★ 7.5
The Winner Takes All
1980 · From Gold: Greatest Hits
Ulvaeus wrote it in an hour over whisky; the video came ten days after his divorce from Fältskog was final.
★ 7.5
Hells Bells
1980 · From Back in Black
A one-ton bronze bell cast to order in Loughborough, recorded inside the foundry, and Johnson's opening words for AC/DC.
★ 7.0