The 25 Best '80s Movies You Have to See

When you think of '80s movies, there's a good chance you're picturing a John Hughes comedy, a genre movie with killer practical effects, or something else that screams pantsuits and Rubix Cubes. However, even though there are plenty of movies that seem emblematic of the decade, there are also a lot of movies that are great films that happen to have come out in the '80s, rather than being stereotypical "'80s movies."

Here, then, are 25 of the best movies to come out of that decade of film. Several of them are titles you're probably expecting see. However, there are also some movies that are a surprise—great films that might not scream, "It's the '80s!," but are nonetheless a huge part of what made the decade in film so special. (We've also limited ourselves to one film per director, in part to prevent folks like Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis from dominating.) Read on to learn more about some of the best movies released between 1980 and 1989…

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There were a bunch of high-profile, star-studded disaster movies in the '70s, such as The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, and the Airport films. After the 1980 release of Airplane!, which spoofs the genre (especially the Airport movies), they more or less stopped making them. Is Airplane! side-splitting, pitch-perfect parodying of the previous decades' disaster flicks the sole reason they went out of vogue? Probably not, but it still serves as a nice transition point, opening the door for the new decades' zany comedies while closing the book on the straightforward seriousness of the previous era. In summation, Leslie Nielsen was a dramatic actor in the '70s; thanks to Airplane!, he became a comedy icon in the '80s.

One of the most impressive animated films ever made, 1988's Akira is a cyberpunk anime about the delinquent teenage leader of a biker gang and his friend, who gains awful telekinetic powers and becomes embroiled in a conspiracy following an accident. Akira is 100 percent hand-drawn, an utterly jaw-dropping feat of artistry and technique given how complex and stunning the animation is. The film is also responsible for the "Akira slide," a motorcycle move that's been copied and homaged as often as any other iconic '80s shot.

Ridley Scott's iconic sci-fi horror classic Alien came out one year too early to be on this list. But James Cameron's 1986 sequel, Aliens, came out smack-dab in the middle of the decade, allowing the '80s to claim one of the greatest action movies ever made—and indeed Cameron does trade some of the original's sense of dread for Space Marines and Sigourney Weaver operating a mech suit. Much like the Xenomorphs, the Alien franchise can transform and still be perfect.

The great F. Murray Abraham stars as Salieri, Mozart's (fictionalized) rival, in this Best Picture-winning historical piece about creativity, competition, and madness. Widely regarded as one of the great American movies of the decade, Amadeus is an exciting adult drama from a time that was full of them—even if it's mostly the decade's genre offerings that are being emulated in the modern blockbuster era.

Some of the shine has come off of Beverly Hills, the glitzy Los Angeles suburb, in the years since Beverly Hills Cop hit theaters in 1984—it doesn't feel as exclusive as it used to, nor does it awe. None of that makes Eddie Murphy's antics as the quick-thinking Detroit cop Axel Foley any less hilarious as his fish out of water makes a big splash in this iconic '80s action-comedy—one that manages to be both earnestly funny and an earnestly good action romp, while so many movies before and since have failed to nail the balance.

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Harrison Ford stars as a man hunting down rogue androids in Ridley Scott's 1982 cyberpunk sci-fi masterpiece Blade Runner, but the film is much deeper than even that intriguing synopsis suggests. An adaptation of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Blade Runner's legacy cannot be overstated. Its depiction of a dystopian, culture-blending version of Los Angeles may be set in 2019, making it technically our past, but it's hard to name a movie that's come out since that hasn't been influenced by Blade Runner's take on the future.

An athlete, a brain, a criminal, a princess, and a basketcase are all sentenced to Sunday detention in John Hughes' 1985 film The Breakfast Club, which is undoubtedly one of the all-time great high school movies. With the exception of Ally Sheedy's unnecessary makeover and the romanticization of Bender's (Judd Nelson) behavior towards Claire (Molly Ringwald), there's nary a wrong note in this film, which features plenty of revealing, earnest drama in addition to its hijinks.

So much of the modern box office is dominated by remakes and reboots of '80s franchises or desperate attempts to mine IP that hasn't been adapted yet. It's kind of ironic, then, that one of the decade's best cult classic comedies is a bit of IP adaptation itself; a take on the board game Clue. Luckily, Clue is a huge amount of wry fun, and you can tell the actors, including Tim Curry, Madeline Kahn, Christopher Lloyd, and Michael McKean, had ball when they made the film, too. It's charmingly unassuming—a descriptor that doesn't apply to a lot of similar movies these days.

This 1985 Soviet anti-war film isn't the type of '80s movie that gets nostalgic homages on Stranger Things, and yet Come and See is one of the best and most important movies of the decade—and one of the hardest to watch. Widely acclaimed for being the rare anti-war film that doesn't accidentally glorify war even a little, Come and See's story of a Belarusian boy who takes up arms to fight back against the Nazis in World War II is the type of film you won't forget. That's especially good, because it's also the type of film that most people won't watch more than once.

Bruce Willis stars as John McClane in Die Hard, a movie that's so great in large part because his super-cop isn't all that super. McClane is a normal (if very resourceful guy) compared to a lot of the other muscle-bound heroes of the '80s movies, like Schwarzenegger and Stallone. The thrill of this 1988 action and Christmas classic comes from watching McClane's underdog battle the odds and single-handedly stop Alan Rickman's Hans Gruber from taking Nakatomi Plaza hostage.

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Spike Lee's 1989 classic Do the Right Thing is unquestionably one of the best movies of the '80s, telling a story of racial tension that's about to boil over on one Brooklyn block on the hottest day of the summer. Lee stars as Mookie, a Bed-Stuy resident living on the frontlines of neighborhood change as Black residents clash with an old, Italian-owned pizza place. As funny as it ends up being tragically moving, Do the Right Thing is an important work of cinema.

With a few exceptions, most new entries in the Star Wars franchise tend to get judged by the standards of other Star Wars content. That's all well and good, but it shouldn't be forgotten that The Empire Strikes Back isn't just the best Star Wars movie, it's also a damn good film on its own merits. If Empire weren't as good from story, acting, directing, cinematography, and visual effects perspectives as the 1980 film is, that galaxy far, far away wouldn't be nearly as important to film history.

The II in Evil Dead II's title is a bit of a misnomer. Sam Raimi didn't make a sequel to his violent, grungy 1982 movie Evil Dead so much as he remade and expanded upon it, this time adding in a lot more comedy elements that make Bruce Campbell's Ash Williams' struggle against the Deadites he and his friends accidentally unleash during a woodland cabin vacation such a singular thrill.

Although it was dinged at the time for being the type of glossy Oscar-bait historical epic that the Academy loved to reward, Bernardo Bertolucci's biopic about Puyi, the titular last Emperor of China, the 1987 film is actually a masterful, beautiful, and nuanced look at the complicated life of a man who was told he was the most important person in the universe as a child only to lose it all in revolutions and the messy tide of history. Watching The Last Emperor now, decades later, you'll find yourself longing for the epics that people took for granted in the '80s.

If you've seen Mad Max: Fury Road but haven't seen George Miller's original Mad Max films from the late-'70s and '80s, you might be forgiven for thinking that the action and filmmaking couldn't possibly live up to that of the more recent film. You would also be amazingly wrong, because The Road Warrior, which stars Mel Gibson as Max, is almost every bit as thrilling as Miller's later masterpiece.ae0fcc31ae342fd3a1346ebb1f342fcb

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Every one of Hayao Miyazaki's films is a masterpiece, but My Neighbor Totoro, whose large, fuzzy forest spirit gave Studio Ghibli its mascot, feels extra special. A lovely, quiet story about two little girls who move to a new house with their dad and encounter something special in the woods outside, 1988's My Neighbor Totoro captures the whimsy, wonder, and even a bit of the scariness of childhood in a way that few other films have ever done.

Limiting this list to just one film per director was the hardest when it came time to decide which Steven Spielberg movie would make the cut, so it is with apologies to E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial that we've got to give the first Indiana Jones movie the nod. A deliberate throwback to the pulp adventure stories that Spielberg enjoyed in his youth, Raiders of the Lost Ark has since become the adventure story that so many modern directors try time and time again to emulate. However, almost none of them have Spielberg's specific flair for filmmaking; it's easy to take for granted, but the action sequences in this 1981 movie are stunning, thrilling, and effortless to follow—no easy feat when so much is happening in Indy's fight against Nazis.

Paul Verhoeven's 1987 movie about a grievously injured policeman who is rebuilt as a brainwashed cyborg meant to brutally take on whatever supposed criminal his masters sic him on is delightfully violent. It is also, like all of Verhoeven's movies, deceptively smart, as RoboCop is an astute parody of Reaganomics and a deft exploration of the nature of humanity—just, you know, starring a robot cop.

Stephen King famously dislikes Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of his novel  The Shining. That's all well and good for him to have adaptational quibbles (Jack Nicholson's protagonist seeming unhinged from the jump rather than a good man brought low by spirits, both liquid and supernatural, was King's main sticking point), but the 1980 movie is undeniably a successful film. Full of eerie imagery that will stick with you long after you've checked out of the Overlook Hotel, The Shining is terrifying, and still, you'll want to rewatch it forever and ever and ever.

The greatest concert film ever made, Jonathan Demme's 1984 documentation of a Talking Heads live show is notable for how stripped down it is. We don't ever go behind the scenes or even cut to shots of the audience enjoying the concert. Instead, we just watch as David Byrne, joined eventually by the rest of the band, puts on an incredible show. It makes you feel like you're there watching it live, even these three decades later. That's an incredible feat.

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This 1985 Japanese comedy is unlike any movie you've probably seen before, and it's wonderful for that. Described as a "Ramen Western," the main plot sees a struggling ramen shop owner become an apprentice to a traveling trucker who is a culinary expert and knows just how to whip her restaurant into shape. Several other plots and vignettes intersect throughout, all of which are love letters to food and dining in its many forms. It's one of (if not the) best movies about food.

John Carpenter's The Thing, an adaptation of an old sci-fi novella called Who Goes There?, which had previously been adapted into a (quite different) film in the '50s, bombed when it hit theaters in 1982. Audiences and critics hated it, perhaps in part because The Thing, which stars Kurt Russell as a researcher at an Antarctic base that's attacked by a horrifying, shape-shifting alien monstrosity, was tonally the exact opposite of Spielberg's heartwarming E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, which also came out that summer. Thankfully, The Thing has since been reappraised as one of the great sci-fi horror films, and nowadays it's mentioned in the same breath as some of the greatest films in history.

A cult classic, acid-black British comedy from 1987, Withnail and I follows two struggling actors living in London in the late '60s. Paul McGann (identified as "… & I" in the credits) tends to follow the lead of Richard E. Grant's more outgoing, charismatic, and very alcoholic Withnail. After getting into some mild trouble in London, the friends decide to take a jaunty vacation to a country cottage, only for things to fall apart in sad and darkly hilarious ways.

Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan star as the titular Harry and Sally in this iconic 1989 rom-com, written by Nora Ephron and directed by Rob Reiner. Told over the course of a decade, When Harry Met Sally… follows a young man and a woman who initially can't stand each other, but when they meet years later, become fast friends—and, perhaps, something more. It's maybe the best rom-com ever made.

In 1988, Robert Zemeckis made a film noir with all the tropes you'd expect from a traditional entry in the genre; hardboiled detective, a shadowy conspiracy, postwar Los Angeles vibes. The twist is that Bob Hoskins' Private Eye Eddie Valiant shares the screen with all sorts of iconic cartoon characters who work in this version of Hollywood, including Bugs Bunny, Mickey Mouse, and Roger Rabbit, who has been fingered for a crime he didn't commit. A special effects masterpiece (all the animation, which seamlessly fits into the live-action footage, was hand-drawn), Who Framed Roger Rabbit excels as a wacky comedy and a pretty dang good noir, too.