The Best ’80s Movies Ever Made Movierulzz

The 1980s was an era defined by certain things. Rubik’s cubes. The rise of MTV and music videos. walkman. Prosperity Fund. Leg warmers. The Reagan era in American politics. Cabbage patch dolls. Atari. Michael Jackson stir. End of the Cold War. Personal computers. Miami Vice. That Billy Joel song about starting fires. And… great movies.

At ScreenCrush, this is clearly what ticks our nostalgia radar the most. The 1980s were perhaps the last great era of Hollywood filmmaking, when studios still frequently took risks on themes and directors, made wide-ranging films with ideas and themes, and didn’t spend every minute of every day thinking about how to extract every last drop of intellectual property juice under their control. You look at the best films of that decade and see all sorts of things that became franchises later on, but very few sequels, prequels or reboots. You just see great filmmaking.

I can prove it. Here is my list of the top 15 films of the 1980s, ranked in order of personal preference. My choices really run the gamut of genres; There’s horror, there’s science fiction, there’s drama, there’s comedy, there’s war, there’s samurai epics, there’s action. And trust me: They’ve all grown up better than leg warmers, Cabbage Patch Dolls, and Billy Joel’s song about starting fires. (No beef with Rubik’s Cubes, these things are still a great way to distract a cranky kid for 20 minutes.)

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