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
Browse by time · year
1986
Showing 122 works across all media from 1986
The Queen is Dead
1986
The band were in a legal fight with their label while making it, and the title track opens with a clip from a 1962 British film.
★ 8.4
There is a Light that Never Goes OutThe Smiths
There is a Light that Never Goes Out
1986 · From The Queen is Dead
Marr faked the strings on an Emulator, credited them to the Hated Salford Ensemble, and Britain waited six years.
★ 8.3
Graceland
1986
Simon recorded with South African musicians in defiance of the cultural boycott and was condemned for it. Bakithi Kumalo's fretless bass runs through everything.
★ 8.1
Master of Puppets
1986
No singles and no videos, and it sold millions anyway. Bassist Cliff Burton was killed when the tour bus crashed in Sweden months later.
★ 8.0
So
1986
The Sledgehammer video was shot frame by frame with Gabriel lying under glass for sixteen hours. Youssou N'Dour sings the end of In Your Eyes.
★ 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
Walk This Way
1986 · From Raising Hell
Rubin had to talk Run-DMC into it; Tyler smashed through the video's wall and Aerosmith got a career back.
★ 7.6
Sledgehammer
1986 · From So
Gabriel wanted real brass, hired the Memphis Horns' Wayne Jackson, then knocked his old band Genesis off number one.
★ 7.5
GracelandPaul Simon
Graceland
1986 · From Graceland
Bakithi Kumalo's fretless bass and a Nigerian pedal steel carry it, with the Everly Brothers singing behind Simon.
★ 7.3
In Your Eyes
1986 · From So
Youssou N'Dour improvising in Wolof, and a bassline so deep it had to move up the vinyl.
★ 7.3
You Can Call Me Al
1986 · From Graceland
Kumalo cut one descending bass measure, Halee reversed the tape for the break, and Chevy Chase mimed it on MTV.
★ 7.3
Platoon
Directed by Oliver Stone
1986
Oliver Stone served in Vietnam and made this to correct everyone else's version: no glamour, no clarity, and a platoon that splits between two sergeants and stays split.
★ 7.3
Eric B. is President
1986 · From Paid in Full
By Eric B.'s account he paid Marley Marl to engineer it in Queensbridge; Rakim arrived rapping like nobody before.
★ 7.3
Livin' on a Prayer
1986 · From Slippery When Wet
The band laughed at Sambora's talk box until it opened the record. The last chorus climbs a minor third.
★ 7.1
Nasty
1986
Jackson answered street harassers by demanding respect over a factory preset Jimmy Jam found on an Ensoniq Mirage.
★ 7.0
Stand By Me
Directed by Rob Reiner
1986
Nothing else captures being twelve years old this exactly: four boys walk along a railway line for two days, and the narration knows precisely how much it mattered.
★ 7.0
Don't Dream It's Over
1986
Froom's Hammond solo does the heavy lifting, and Finn wrote the rest as an exhortation to himself.
★ 7.0
Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.
Ferris Bueller's Day Off · 1986
Ferris Bueller's Day Off
Directed by John Hughes
1986
Truancy has never looked this appealing: Ferris talks straight to the audience, takes a Ferrari and a parade, and the whole film is completely on his side.
★ 6.8
Red Sorghum
A Novel of China
1986 · 359 pages
Bandits waylay a bride bound for a leprous distiller, and the son conceived in the sorghum grows up under Japanese occupation. Mo Yan makes rural Shandong's violence gorgeous and unbearable at once.
★ 6.8
South BronxBoogie Down Productions
South Bronx
1986 · From Criminal Minded
James Brown horns looped, an answer to MC Shan's The Bridge, and hip hop's birthplace claimed for the Bronx.
★ 6.7
True Colors
1986
Anne Murray turned it down, so Lauper took Steinberg and Kelly's gospel ballad and stripped it to almost nothing.
★ 6.7
You Gotta Fight For Your Right To Party
1986 · From Licensed to Ill
Conceived as a satire of party songs, it became the band's only top ten hit, the joke unnoticed.
★ 6.5
No Sleep Till Brooklyn
1986 · From Licensed to Ill
Slayer's Kerry King plays the solo, the title bends Motorhead's, and Rubin welds rap to metal without apology.
★ 6.5
You Give Love a Bad Name
1986 · From Slippery When Wet
A Bonnie Tyler chorus that went nowhere, rewritten by Desmond Child, and suddenly Bon Jovi's first number one.
★ 6.5
Peter Piper
1986 · From Raising Hell
Bells lifted from a Bob James record, nursery-rhyme characters conscripted, and Jam Master Jay finally getting his own showcase.
★ 6.3
Addicted to Love
1986
Chaka Khan's label blocked her from the duet, so Palmer sang it alone over Tony Thompson's drum intro.
★ 6.3
Higher Love
1986
Chaka Khan's backing vocals lift Winwood's first solo number one, and the Grammy for Record of the Year followed.
★ 6.2
The Final Countdown
1986
One synth riff, written years earlier on a Korg Polysix borrowed from Michaeli, went to number one in twenty-five countries.
★ 6.2
Decolonising the Mind
The Politics of Language in African Literature
1986 · 114 pages
Ngugi's schoolmasters caned children for speaking Gikuyu, or hung a plate around their necks reading I AM STUPID. Empire takes the mind through language, he argues, and he abandoned English for his fiction.
★ 6.2
The Way It Is
1986
Hornsby wrote the words first in a Van Nuys garage; that piano figure later became the spine of Tupac's Changes.
★ 6.2
Licensed to Ill
1986
Kerry King of Slayer plays the guitar solo. Rick Rubin built the beats out of Led Zeppelin and AC/DC drums played very loud.
★ 6.0
Fall On Me
1986
Conceived as an acid rain protest, the melody rewritten before release; Stipe called it a general oppression song.
★ 6.0
Live to Tell
1986 · From True Blue
Leonard wrote it as a film instrumental that Paramount passed on; Madonna added the words and kept her demo vocal.
★ 6.0
Raising Hell
1986
Aerosmith had not heard of Run-D.M.C. and were barely working when Rick Rubin got them into the studio to redo Walk This Way.
★ 5.9
Hold It Now, Hit It
1986 · From Licensed to Ill
Rubin piled samples where everyone else looped one, and the title itself comes from Kurtis Blow's Christmas Rappin'.
★ 5.8
Ego Trippin'Ultramagnetic MC's
Ego Trippin'
1986 · From Critical Beatdown
First record to lift the Synthetic Substitution break, which hip hop never stopped using, with Kool Keith rhyming deliberately off-beat.
★ 5.8
The Fatal Shore
1986 · 628 pages
Britain shipped 160,000 convicts to Australia between 1787 and 1868. Hughes takes you down into the floggings and the Norfolk Island cells, and out again into the nation they made there.
★ 5.8
A Better Tomorrow
Directed by John Woo
1986 · Hong Kong
It made Chow Yun-fat a superstar and started an entire Hong Kong genre: two brothers on opposite sides of the law, and a gunman in a trenchcoat lighting a cigarette with money.
★ 5.7
Arctic Dreams
1986 · 474 pages
Five years in the high Arctic, among narwhals and muskoxen and light that behaves like nothing further south. Lopez asks what Westerners have wanted from that country, and what the wanting cost.
★ 5.6
Brass Monkey
1986 · From Licensed to Ill
Rick Rubin looped Wild Sugar's "Bring It Here" under an 808, and a cocktail's name became a chant.
★ 5.5
Honey from a Weed
1986 · 374 pages
Gray gave up an editor's job for stone quarries in Tuscany, Catalonia, Naxos, and Apulia, cooking wild greens, snails, and game over wood fires and setting down a Mediterranean already disappearing.
★ 5.3
If You Leave
1986
John Hughes reshot Pretty in Pink's ending and asked for 120 BPM; OMD turned it around in a day or two.
★ 5.2
Open Your Heart
1986 · From True Blue
Written as a rock song for Cyndi Lauper, then rebuilt with Patrick Leonard into Madonna's fifth American number one.
★ 5.0
Walk Like an Egyptian
1986
A tape loop, a LinnDrum, and a whistled hook: David Kahne built it while three Bangles split the verses.
★ 4.8
Your Love (The Outfield)
1986
Guitarist John Spinks wrote it, Tony Lewis sang it, and producer William Wittman pushed the band past their softer demo.
★ 4.8
Human
1986 · From Crash
Jam and Lewis wrote it in Minneapolis, and Oakey called that vocal the best he ever gave.
★ 4.8
Notorious
1986 · From Notorious
Nile Rodgers brought the riff and the Borneo Horns; the band, down to three, answered its own bad press.
★ 4.7
A Season on the Brink
1986 · 368 pages
Feinstein spent the 1985-86 season inside coach Bob Knight's Indiana basketball program and printed all of it, the profanity and the fury and the players absorbing both. Sports reporters still envy that access.
★ 4.6
Top Gun
Directed by Tony Scott
1986
Theaters in Los Angeles and Detroit let Navy recruiters set up tables in the lobby: Tony Scott shot fighter jets in golden light and sold an entire decade on aviator sunglasses.
★ 4.6
Hoosiers
Directed by David Anspaugh
1986
Indiana still argues about how close it is to what actually happened in 1954: Gene Hackman coaches a town of a few hundred people who care about nothing else at all.
★ 4.5
Take Me Home Tonight
1986
Told it was impossible, Money phoned Ronnie Spector himself, and she sings her 1963 hook right back.
★ 4.4
Love You Forever
1986 · 32 pages
A mother sings the same four lines to her son at every age, and the years turn the song around. Munsch made it up after two stillborn children.
★ 4.4
(I Just) Died In Your ArmsCutting Crew
(I Just) Died In Your Arms
1986
Van Eede scribbled the title down the night it occurred to him; Terry Brown drummed it on Neil Peart's snare.
★ 4.2
Take My Breath Away
1986
Whitlock met Moroder by fixing his Ferrari, then wrote the lyric driving home; Nunn took it to number one.
★ 4.2
Danger Zone
1986
Four acts turned it down before Loggins said yes, and Moroder's synth roar stalled at two behind "Sledgehammer."
★ 4.2
The Color of Money
Directed by Martin Scorsese
1986
Paul Newman got his Oscar twenty-five years late, for playing the same character a second time: Scorsese films pool halls like boxing rings, and Tom Cruise is the new hustler.
★ 4.1
Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc.
1986
Nashville would not have him, so Yoakam played Los Angeles punk clubs instead, on bills with X and the Blasters, in very tight jeans.
★ 4.0
The Mission
Directed by Roland Joffe
1986 · United Kingdom
Ennio Morricone said he recognized himself in this score technically and spiritually: Jesuits build a mission above the Iguazu falls in the 1750s, and Europe decides its fate from several thousand miles away.
★ 4.0
Slippery When Wet
1986
They played demos to groups of New Jersey teenagers and cut the songs the kids liked least. It sold twenty-eight million copies.
★ 3.9
Speech to the American Enterprise Institute, December 3, 1986 · 1986
How can I possibly be expected to handle school on a day like this?
Ferris Bueller's Day Off · 1986
No, we will not die like dogs, we will fight like lions because we are the three amigos!
Three Amigos! · 1986
Ferris Bueller's Day Off · 1986
Three Amigos! · 1986
Big Trouble in Little China
Directed by John Carpenter
1986
It flopped completely and then found everybody on video: Kurt Russell's swaggering trucker is really the useless sidekick, and nothing in it is ever explained to anyone.
★ 3.6
1986
We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.
Nobel Prize Lecture, 1986 · 1986
Three Amigos! · 1986
The Drowned and the Saved · 1986
Pretty in Pink
Directed by Howard Deutch
1986
Molly Ringwald's prom dress is stitched together from two others, an image the whole film runs on: Howard Deutch directs a John Hughes script about who gets to sit where.
★ 3.2