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
Browse by time · year
1988
Showing 16 films from 1988
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
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
The Thin Blue Line
Directed by Errol Morris
1988
A documentary that overturned a real murder conviction: Morris reconstructed the same killing over and over from contradictory testimony, and the case collapsed within a year of release.
★ 7.0
Cinema Paradiso
Directed by Giuseppe Tornatore
1988 · Italy
Morricone wrote the theme that reduces grown men to tears: a Sicilian boy grows up in a village projection booth, and the subject underneath is what movies do to a life.
★ 6.7
A Fish Called Wanda
Directed by Charles Crichton
1988
A Danish audiologist reportedly died laughing during a screening: Charles Crichton was seventy-seven and made the fastest farce of the decade, with four thieves who all intend to betray the others.
★ 6.2
The Naked Gun
Directed by David Zucker
1988
The Zucker team moved their television cop parody to the big screen and improved it: Leslie Nielsen anchors a squad room where three more gags are running behind every line.
★ 6.0
Big
Directed by Penny Marshall
1988
Penny Marshall became the first woman to direct a film that made a hundred million dollars: Tom Hanks plays a thirteen-year-old in an adult body and never once winks at the audience.
★ 5.6
Rain Man
Directed by Barry Levinson
1988
Hoffman spent a year with autistic men before shooting and the film changed what most people thought autism was: two brothers, one Buick, and a drive across America neither of them wanted.
★ 5.6
Dangerous Liaisons
Directed by Stephen Frears
1988
Glenn Close and John Malkovich play two aristocrats who ruin people for entertainment: Frears films eighteenth-century seduction as a campaign with objectives, and the wit stays lethal to the end.
★ 5.5
The Last Temptation of Christ
Directed by Martin Scorsese
1988
A Paris cinema showing it was firebombed and Scorsese needed years to get it financed: Christ imagined as someone who could refuse, with Peter Gabriel's score sounding like the actual Middle East.
★ 5.3
Beetlejuice
Directed by Tim Burton
1988
Michael Keaton appears for roughly seventeen minutes and the film belongs entirely to him: Tim Burton makes the afterlife a bureaucracy with waiting rooms, and the possessed dinner party is the peak.
★ 5.2
Coming to America
Directed by John Landis
1988
Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall play four characters each under Rick Baker's makeup: an African prince goes to Queens specifically to be treated like nobody, and the barbershop scenes steal it.
★ 5.0
Midnight Run
Directed by Martin Brest
1988
De Niro is funnier here than in any comedy he tried to be funny in: a bounty hunter has to move an embezzling accountant coast to coast, and the accountant never stops talking.
★ 4.9
Bull Durham
Directed by Ron Shelton
1988
Ron Shelton played five years of minor league baseball and wrote what he actually saw: the mound conference about wedding presents is the funniest scene in any sports film.
★ 4.8
Eight Men Out
Directed by John Sayles
1988
The 1919 World Series fix filmed as a labor dispute rather than a scandal: John Sayles shows eight underpaid White Sox taking money from gamblers, and an owner who pays them nothing.
★ 3.3