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
Closer
1980
Ian Curtis killed himself two months before it came out. The sleeve, chosen beforehand, is a photograph of a tomb.
★ 7.0
On the Road Again
1980 · From Honeysuckle Rose
An airsickness bag, a film producer's request, and a single cut live at a club over two Austin nights.
★ 7.0
Call Me
1980
Moroder cut the backing track in Los Angeles, Harry wrote the words in hours, and it ruled 1980.
★ 6.9
The Breaks
1980
Eighty-four uses of one word, a live band instead of samples, and the first rap single certified gold.
★ 6.8
This Earth of Mankind
1980 · 368 pages
Minke, a Javanese student under Dutch rule, loves the daughter of a concubine running the estate its Dutch owner cannot. Indonesia banned it for a generation and now claims it as its greatest.
★ 6.8
Pretenders
1980
Chrissie Hynde moved from Ohio to London, worked in Malcolm McLaren's clothes shop and wrote for the NME before getting a band together.
★ 6.8
A Confederacy of Dunces
1980 · 394 pages
Ignatius J. Reilly, obese and certain the modern age is beneath him, is pushed out of his mother's New Orleans house to find work. Toole wrote the funniest American novel of its century.
★ 6.8
Crazy Little Thing Called Love
1980 · From Greatest Hits
Ten minutes after a Munich bath, a borrowed Fender not the Red Special, and Queen's first American number one.
★ 6.5
The Shining · 1980
Dirty Mind
1980
Prince made it at home as a set of demos, and Warner decided to put them out exactly as they were.
★ 6.5
Camera Lucida
1980 · 119 pages
Grieving his mother, Barthes asks what a photograph is and answers with the punctum, the detail that wounds you. Photography criticism has argued in the vocabulary he invented here ever since.
★ 6.5
Cosmos
1980 · 432 pages
Sagan moves from the Big Bang to the Library of Alexandria to the carbon in your body, forged inside dying stars. No science book written in English had ever sold so well.
★ 6.4
Don't Stand So Close to Me
1980 · From Zenyatta Mondatta
Sting drew on his years teaching and on Nabokov, then watched it become Britain's best-selling single of 1980.
★ 6.3
Goodbye, Darkness
A Memoir of the Pacific War
1980 · 416 pages
Returning decades later to the Pacific islands where he served as a Marine sergeant, Manchester sets the quiet beaches against what happened there. He was badly wounded on Okinawa and kept dreaming it.
★ 6.3
Celebration
1980
Recorded in a New Jersey studio with Deodato producing, and adopted everywhere from ballparks to the hostages' homecoming.
★ 6.3
Hit Me With Your Best Shot
1980
Schwartz took the title from a pillow-punching therapy session, and Benatar made it her first American top ten.
★ 6.2
Desert
1980 · 352 pages
Two journeys decades apart: a boy walking north with the blue-veiled nomads driven from the Sahara by French troops, and a girl of their blood who leaves a Moroccan shantytown for Marseille.
★ 6.1
Clear Light of Day
1980 · 182 pages
In a decaying Old Delhi house, two sisters reopen everything the family did to each other in 1947, the year of Partition. Desai makes still summer afternoons unbearable.
★ 6.1