The Best ’80s Movies Ever Made

The 1980s were an era defined by certain things. Rubik’s cubes. The rise of MTV and music videos. The Walkman. The boom box. Leg warmers. The Reagan Era of American politics. Cabbage Patch Dolls. Atari. Michael Jackson’s Thriller. The end of the Cold War. Personal computers. Miami Vice. That Billy Joel song about starting fires. And … awesome movies.

At ScreenCrush, obviously that’s what pings our nostalgia radar the most. The 1980s were perhaps the last great era of big-time Hollywood filmmaking, when the studios still took repeated risks on subjects and directors, and made movies of scale with ideas and themes and didn’t spend every minute of every day thinking about how they could squeeze each and every last drop of juice from the IP under their control. You look at the best films of that decade and you see all sorts of things that became franchises later, but very few sequels or prequels or reboots. You just see great moviemaking.

I can prove it. Here’s my list of the 15 best ’80s movies, ranked in order of personal preference. My picks really run the genre gamut; there’s horror, there’s sci-fi, there’s drama, there’s comedy, there’s war, there’s samurai epics, there’s action. And trust me: They’ve all aged better than leg warmers and Cabbage Patch Dolls and the Billy Joel song about starting fires. (No beef with Rubik’s cubes, those things remain a great way to distract a cranky child for 20 minutes.)

READ MORE: Great ’80s Movies That Got Bad Reviews