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
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1989
Showing 18 films from 1989
When Harry Met Sally
Directed by Rob Reiner
1989
Every romantic comedy since has been trying to write this conversation: two people argue for twelve years about whether men and women can be friends, and Ephron's dialogue wins.
★ 7.2
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
Directed by Steven Spielberg
1989
Casting Sean Connery as the father was the best idea the series ever had: the bickering carries a treasure hunt that would otherwise just be a rerun.
★ 7.1
Crimes and Misdemeanors
Directed by Woody Allen
1989
Allen's most serious film, and his only one that asks whether anyone is watching at all: a respected doctor is cornered by a woman he cannot pay off.
★ 7.0
The Killer
Directed by John Woo
1989 · Hong Kong
Woo shoots gunfights the way other directors shoot musical numbers: two pistols, slow motion, doves, and underneath it a straight-faced story about honor between a hitman and the cop hunting him.
★ 6.8
Glory
Directed by Edward Zwick
1989
The Civil War film that finally noticed who else was fighting it: the 54th Massachusetts fights for boots, for pay equal to white soldiers, and for permission to be used at all.
★ 6.7
Sex, Lies and Videotape
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
1989
American independent film became a business the week Soderbergh took the Palme d'Or at twenty-six: he made it for a million dollars, and it is four people talking about what they want.
★ 6.1
The Little Mermaid
Directed by Ron Clements and John Musker
1989
Disney's renaissance starts here: Howard Ashman and Alan Menken wrote the songs like Broadway numbers, and the studio remembered how to make an animated musical that adults would sit through.
★ 6.1
Dead Poets Society
Directed by Peter Weir
1989
Nobody who saw it at the right age has stopped quoting it: Robin Williams plays a teacher who tells boys at a 1959 boarding school that poetry is worth risking something for.
★ 6.0
Henry V (1989)
Directed by Kenneth Branagh
1989 · United Kingdom
Branagh was twenty-eight and directing himself in Shakespeare, which should have been a disaster: the long single take across the mud after Agincourt is the finest shot in eighties British cinema.
★ 5.8
Field of Dreams
Directed by Phil Alden Robinson
1989
They built the field on an Iowa farm and people still drive to see it: a man plows under his corn because a voice tells him to, and the last reel gets everyone.
★ 5.4
Batman
Directed by Tim Burton
1989
Fifty thousand people wrote to Warner Bros protesting the casting of a comedy actor as Batman: Burton and Michael Keaton made the character gothic, and Prince wrote the songs.
★ 5.1
Born on the Fourth of July
Directed by Oliver Stone
1989
Ron Kovic wrote the book and then the screenplay with Oliver Stone, who had been to the same war: a Long Island boy enlists in 1967, and Tom Cruise abandons his own image.
★ 4.7
My Left Foot
Directed by Jim Sheridan
1989
Christy Brown wrote and painted with one foot, and nothing here makes him saintly: Jim Sheridan films a Dublin family that treats him as theirs, loudly and without any ceremony.
★ 4.6
Drugstore Cowboy
Directed by Gus Van Sant
1989
William Burroughs turns up as a defrocked priest and somehow that is not the oddest thing here: Van Sant films a crew robbing pharmacies in 1971 Portland with no lecture attached.
★ 4.5
Roger and Me
Directed by Michael Moore
1989
Michael Moore invented a whole documentary style here, himself as the persistent nuisance: Flint, Michigan after General Motors leaves, filmed by someone who grew up in it.
★ 4.5
National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation
Directed by Jeremiah Chechik
1989
Written by John Hughes, with Chevy Chase back as the same hapless father a third time: a man books two weeks off to build the perfect family Christmas out of things that break.
★ 3.9
Driving Miss Daisy
Directed by Bruce Beresford
1989
Jessica Tandy was eighty when she won Best Actress, the oldest ever: twenty-five years of an Atlanta employer and her chauffeur, played so lightly that people underrate what the film is doing.
★ 2.7