It was the decade given to us by the Reagan administration, the Rubik’s Cube, the Reflex, and the Run DMC. (Thank you for three of these things.) And if you went to the movies regularly, you were blessed with a constant diet of excited teenagers, killer robots, nostalgic aliens, raging bulls, road wars, teams of cops and crooks, and more dystopian visions of the future than you would could shake a time traveler DeLorean. For a long time, the 1980s were considered a bit of a cinematic deadlock between the 1970s, the inventors of the new Hollywood / modern blockbuster, and the more witty, ironic indie revolution, the 1990s. It was a lull, a pause button pressed, a clearing of the throat between the arias. But that 10-year period cut off a handful of movie stars in the Hall of Fame. Multiplex culture is thriving. Genres such as science fiction and horror are reaching new heights. Several great directors brought their A play to the 1980s, blood transfusions from fresh-blooded directors took to the stage with breakthroughs and bold debuts, and a handful of veteran international authors made late masterpieces. Documentaries have become officially innovative, socially insightful and more popular than ever. It has never been the lost decade that people say it is.
So it was not so difficult, after many nights fed by Zima, to release VHS tapes in and from our VCRs, to make a final ranked list of the 100 greatest films of the 80’s of the last century. Some of them went home with the Oscars. Some have dominated the box office for weeks. Some of them immediately became cult classics, while others were smaller films supported by a few at the time, and only recently – and belatedly – were they rediscovered as real treasures. Some are movies that may have gone completely under your radar, but not only have stood the test of time, but have proven to be worth yours. And all these selections are the ones we thought represented not only the decade they came from, but also the best that the cinema of the eighties could offer.