The 15 Best '80s Movies, Ranked

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With their shifty, erratic, uneasy bridging of the gap between the electrified new cinema of the '70s and the boundless experimentation of the '90s, the '80s often get a bad rap as far as movie decades go. The mere mention of them can conjure up the mental image of movie hits that haven't aged well, cheesy Oscar-ready prestige dramas, and redundant sequels that time forgot. But that's only half the story.

In reality, the '80s were the stage for some of the most momentous and trailblazing cinema of the 20th century, on all levels of budget, scale, and accessibility. This list compiles the 15 films that stand as the decade's greatest artistic achievements, limited to fiction features and ranked by a combination of craft, vision, influence, and importance to the medium. From 18th-century Vienna to pre-colonial Mali to the bustling streets of modern-day Manila, this is the very best of what '80s cinema has to offer.

Directed by the brilliant Ana Carolina, "After Eight... Forever" is one of the great feminist classics of the 1980s and a foundational text in contemporary transgressive cinema. Brazilian screen icon Xuxa Lopes stars as Tereza, a thirty-something woman who begins to reassess her life, seeking a path away from the trappings of societal conservatism by embarking on a series of profound, prismatic, purportedly liberated relationships with various men. As Tereza soon learns, however, for a woman in the late 20th century, liberation is far from a straightforward process.

An ambitious neo-surrealist masterpiece, "After Eight... Forever" is a gorgeous, challenging, slippery record of the most internal and existential dimensions of feminist thought in a tempestuous transitional era. It's also a movie that will keep you doubling over in disbelief at what you're seeing, from the beginning to the very end.

• Cast: Xuxa Lopes, Ney Matogrosso, Daniel Dantas
• Director: Ana Carolina
• Rating: Not rated
• Runtime: 96 minutes
• Where to Watch: Not available in the U.S.

Arguably director Martin Scorsese's single greatest film, "Raging Bull" finds the New Hollywood master and his genius editor and partner-in-crime, Thelma Schoonmaker, teaming up for their purest, most devastating, most uproarious coup de cinéma. Robert De Niro, in one of his absolute best movies, stars as 1950s middleweight boxing superstar Jake LaMotta, and the film is merciless in charting LaMotta's meteoric rise and precipitous fall into athletic and moral disgrace alike.

Instead of conforming to the standard shape of a sports biopic, "Raging Bull" cowers in mesmerized terror at the sheer brutality of LaMotta's line of work and finds in it the physical expression of a profound existential malaise. No other movie so gracefully yet forcefully translates into motion Scorsese's pet theme of American masculinity as a corrosion of the soul; every smash cut and gnarly head-on close-up of De Niro feels like its own right uppercut.

• Cast: Robert De Niro, Cathy Moriarty, Joe Pesci
• Director: Martin Scorsese
• Rating: R
• Runtime: 129 minutes
• Where to Watch: MGM+, Amazon Video (rent/buy), Apple TV (rent/buy)

"Angel's Egg" was the first fully original film from Japanese anime luminary Mamoru Oshii, and "original" is just about the best word to describe it in pretty much every sense. A 71-minute animated reverie with minimal context and dialogue, this is among the most bizarre anime ever made. But embrace the abstraction, and you'll be graced with one of the most stunning fantasy films of all time.

There's little sense in explaining too much about a plot that defies comprehension even as it unfolds, but the gist of "Angel's Egg" is that a girl (Mako Hyōdō) is wandering through a dark, decaying landscape while carrying a large egg. Eventually, when she befriends a boy (Jinpachi Nezu), their interaction leads to a series of philosophical conversations — and to a conclusion no amount of talking could prepare any viewer for. Nothing is ultimately explained, but the images and allegorical ideas of "Angel's Egg" burrow themselves so deeply into the mind as to take up permanent residence.

• Cast: Mako Hyōdō, Jinpachi Nezu, Keiichi Noda
• Director: Mamoru Oshii
• Rating: Not rated
• Runtime: 71 minutes
• Where to Watch: Not available in the U.S.

The boldest, most vivacious, and all-around best film from Filipina director Marilou Diaz-Abaya, "Moral" epitomizes the nexus between humanist and political filmmaking. Epic in scope and freewheeling in structure, the film follows the lives of four female friends at the University of the Philippines Diliman over the course of several years from their graduation onwards.

In that time, they experience various disparate facets of life as women in late-'70s Philippine society, relying on their friendship as an anchor of love and support through the hardships of patriarchal oppression. Diaz-Abaya, screenwriter Ricky Lee, and their spectacular cast fearlessly tackle taboo subjects and white-hot topics, but what emerges from "Moral's" patient 138 minutes is a sense of lives lived to their fullest. As attuned as it is to its particular place and era, it's one of those rare, precious movies that expresses nothing less than what it means to be alive.

• Cast: Lorna Tolentino, Gina Alajar, Sandy Andolong
• Director: Marilou Diaz-Abaya
• Rating: TV-MA
• Runtime: 138 minutes
• Where to Watch: Amazon Video (rent/buy), Apple TV (rent/buy)

Of all the avant-garde masterpieces directed by Chantal Akerman, none are more adroit than "Toute une Nuit" at finding a middle ground between radical formal experimentation and no-holds-barred emotional expression. Continuing the reinvention of cinematic time and space that Akerman had begun with "Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles," "Toute une Nuit" acts as a precursor to the "hyperlink films" of the '90s and 2000s with its interconnected story of various insomniac citizens of Brussels prancing about town one late summer night.

The kicker, as there must ever be with Akerman, is that the sleepless adventures of the film's large ensemble are presented as pure poetic vignettes, with little in the way of dialogue or context. Akerman gives us a mess of shards of these people's lives, zeroing in on chance connections, bitter rejections, enveloping loneliness, and everything else that keeps us up at night as the film flits between these moments with virtuosic cinematic grace.

• Cast: Aurore Clément, Tchéky Karyo, Angelo Abazoglou
• Director: Chantal Akerman
• Rating: Not rated
• Runtime: 90 minutes
• Where to Watch: The Criterion Channel

Also known as "City After Dark," the 1980 Ishmael Bernal film "Manila by Night" is the kind of overlooked older masterwork that feels too special and ahead of its time to be real. How else do you explain a movie made at the height of Ferdinand Marcos' rule, a full decade before the "new queer cinema" of the '90s, that somehow finds the space to weave together numerous vibrant tales of working-class queer life in all its shapes and shades in the urban underbelly of the Philippines' capital?

As if that weren't impressive enough, "Manila by Night" also happens to be one of the best, most exuberant films of all time: A kaleidoscope of tragedy, comedy, sharp social observation, languid romanticism, and scrumptious colors that Bernal sustains with bracing craftsmanship for the entire two-and-a-half-hour duration. Very few movies out there will give you so much darn movie for your buck.

• Cast: Charito Solis, Alma Moreno, Lorna Tolentino
• Director: Ishmael Bernal
• Rating: TV-MA
• Runtime: 150 minutes
• Where to Watch: Not available in the U.S.

There are intense movies, and then there's "Amadeus," one of the most overpowering feats of total cinema ever. As far as sheer craft goes, there's little in the history of American film that rises to the level of what Miloš Forman accomplishes in his telling of the 18th-century rivalry between Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Tom Hulce) and Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham). The way Forman brings together music, montage, visual lushness, and maximalist acting is operatic in the best way.

Even leaving aside the question of impressiveness, however, "Amadeus" is an unforgettable cinematic experience just for the emotional and philosophical wallop that it packs. Few other grand tragedies in movie history have ever been so persuasive, so deeply-felt, so imbued with the existential weight of regret and obsession and death and madness. For once, here's a Best Picture Oscar winner that exemplifies the very best of what a Hollywood budget applied to big crowd-stirring sensibilities can accomplish.

• Cast: F. Murray Abraham, Tom Hulce, Elizabeth Berridge
• Director: Miloš Forman
• Rating: PG
• Runtime: 160 minutes
• Where to Watch: Amazon Video (rent/buy), Apple TV (rent/buy)

In 1982, American poet, playwright, filmmaker, college professor, and activist Kathleen Collins pulled together various strands of her effervescent academic and artistic life into "Losing Ground," a film that translates big ideas into scorchingly personal storytelling. Through the story of a married couple that begins to drift apart while exploring disparate intellectual pursuits, Collins revolutionized what American cinema — and especially American cinema about Black women's experiences — could look and move like.

Tragically for American cinema, "Losing Ground" didn't snag commercial distribution until 2015. At that point, it immediately became clear that the public had missed out for decades on a positively galvanizing totem of indie movie history — an arresting, pensive, intelligent, epistemologically enormous romantic drama for adults that was nothing like any American film of its era. "Losing Ground" runs laps of wit and originality around movies made years or even decades later. Watching it today feels like getting a glimpse into a brighter alternate universe of American cinema that never came to be.

• Cast: Seret Scott, Bill Gunn, Duane James
• Director: Kathleen Collins
• Rating: Not rated
• Runtime: 86 minutes
• Where to Watch: The Criterion Channel, Metrograph, Amazon Video (rent/buy), Apple TV (rent/buy)

The arguable cinematic gold standard for socially conscious sci-fi, Lizzie Borden's "Born in Flames" takes place in an alternate version of the United States that has undergone a political revolution and ushered in a democratic socialist would-be utopia. Yet problems persist, and women from various marginalized sectors of New York City society — from workers to lesbians to Black activists to the various intersections thereof — now find themselves forced to band together, build solidarity, and fight tooth and nail for changes that have not come.

The film's openly-spoken debates and conflicts are startling in their freshness and prescience; the trust Borden places in viewers to keep up with her rich mélange of drama and sociology is virtually unparalleled. It would almost be accurate to say that "Born in Flames" feels like a 2025 movie beamed 40 years into the past, if not for the fact that there's hardly anything in contemporary cinema that touches its boldness, maturity, wisdom, and depth.

• Cast: Honey, Adele Bertei, Jean Satterfield
• Director: Lizzie Borden
• Rating: Not rated
• Runtime: 79 minutes
• Where to Watch: The Criterion Channel, OVID, Apple TV (rent/buy)

If there's a single film that encapsulates the beauty of Pedro Almodóvar, it's "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown." Watch it now, and it won't be hard to see why it became a worldwide phenomenon in 1988. It's a movie that pushes to extremes the concept of the Almodóvar picture as a pleasure center refresher, capable of making every other movie seem bland and boring by comparison.

Original "chica Almodóvar" Carmen Maura stars as voice actress Pepa, who is abruptly and heartbreakingly abandoned by her boyfriend and co-worker Iván (Fernando Guillén), and sets out to understand why he left her. Along her journey, Pepa meets a litany of eccentric, unforgettable female characters who make up one of the most extraordinary ensemble casts in movie history. For a film made just 37 years ago, its tragicomic ritz genuinely registers as a watershed moment; when Almodóvar first unleashed it, it truly felt as though the world of movies had just gone through a seismic change.

• Cast: Carmen Maura, Antonio Banderas, Julieta Serrano
• Director: Pedro Almodóvar
• Rating: R
• Runtime: 88 minutes
• Where to Watch: Amazon Video (rent/buy), Apple TV (rent/buy)

The greatest Malian film ever and a strong claimant to the post of best African film of all time, Souleymane Cissé's "Yeelen" hardly needs the weight of those lofty titles to dazzle and haunt as a pure viewing experience. It's lavish fantasy cinema as repurposed into a tool of artistic and imaginative reconfiguration. In response to decades of reductive European ethnographic films "about Africa," Cissé made a film that proposed a grand mythological tableau for Mali and, in doing so, expanded the recesses of West Africa's cinematic self-image.

Issiaka Kane plays Nianankoro, a young man in 13th-century Mali who is gifted with magic powers much like his estranged father, Soma (Niamanto Sanogo). When a vision reveals to the wicked Soma that he will die by his son's hand, Nianankoro must find the means to evade his father's pursuit and kill him before he's killed — and so begins a grand tragedy that ranks among cinema's greatest, carried off through images of unimaginable poetic and allegorical force.

• Cast: Issiaka Kane, Aoua Sangare, Niamanto Sanogo
• Director: Souleymane Cissé
• Rating: Not rated
• Runtime: 105 minutes
• Where to Watch: Kanopy

There is simply no denying or resisting the brutal power of Elem Klimov's "Come and See" and its uncompromising anti-war lament. As manifested in the story of Belarusian teenage soldier Flyora (Aleksei Kravchenko, in a practically flawless debut performance) and his traumatic trudge through the nightmare of World War II, war is not just hell but something even more dispiriting — an unveiling of the full breadth of humanity's potential, for worse and for worse.

Yet for all the horrors it displays, the legendarily upsetting "Come and See" is by no means a cynical, sadistic, or misanthropic film. On the contrary, there's aching empathy and solidarity pulsating at the core of its carnival of doom, as though Klimov were cataloguing the absolute worst of what people can do to each other in a desperate effort to prevent it all from ever happening again. It's one of cinema's most effective, sensorially jolting, and emotionally overwhelming works.

• Cast: Aleksei Kravchenko, Olga Mironova, Liubomiras Laucevicius
• Director: Elem Klimov
• Rating: TV-MA
• Runtime: 142 minutes
• Where to Watch: The Criterion Channel, Kanopy, Amazon Video (rent/buy), Apple TV (rent/buy)

Pretty much every Hayao Miyazaki movie would make a perfectly defensible pick for any best-of list, and this list in particular could just as well spotlight the tough warmth of "Kiki's Delivery Service" or the epic anti-war sweep of "Nausicäa of the Valley of the Wind." But, at the end of the day, there's just something about the perfect, endlessly evocative simplicity of "My Neighbor Totoro" that makes it tower above the near-entirety of the animated medium, to say nothing of the film medium at large.

It's all down to the way Miyazaki inhabits and honors a child's view of life — of the world as a springboard towards mystery, flanked on every side by the liminal and the enchanting alike. There are no clear-cut "messages" or "lessons" to glean from "My Neighbor Totoro," because the world of Miyazaki's masterpiece is not the world as considered but the world as felt. We see it, we get lost in it, we don't understand all of it, but it lights in us an enduring spark of curiosity and love. Such is the mark of great art.

• Cast: Hitoshi Takagi, Noriko Hidaka, Chika Sakamoto
• Director: Hayao Miyazaki
• Rating: G
• Runtime: 86 minutes
• Where to Watch: Max, Amazon Video (rent/buy), Apple TV (rent/buy)

Most great directors are long since past their prime by the time they get up to 30-plus years of making movies, but not so with Agnès Varda. A whole three decades after shaking up French cinema with her feature debut, "La Pointe Courte," in 1955, Varda was once again bringing down the house with "Vagabond," her arguable magnum opus.

If almost every Varda movie starts from deceptive simplicity and serenity before gradually taking on the weight of a gut-wrenching requiem, "Vagabond" is her most direct and unflinching tussle with the fundamental sadness of the human condition. The great Sandrine Bonnaire stars as a young woman whose post-mortem life reconstruction reveals the slow discombobulation of an untethered soul — a setup to which Varda brings staggering, incomparable clarity of expression, using all her might to unravel each thread of what we understand to be the "meaning of life." What Mona wants, what she craves, what she resents, what that says about us all — it all gets laid out in vast, vanishing scale across the Languedoc-Roussillon vineyards.

• Cast: Sandrine Bonnaire, Macha Méril, Stéphane Freiss
• Director: Agnès Varda
• Rating: Not rated
• Runtime: 106 minutes
• Where to Watch: The Criterion Channel

It says something about how darn incredible "Do the Right Thing" is that, even with the veritable embarrassment of riches on this list, nothing else really feels right for the #1 spot. It's appropriate, too, that Spike Lee's multi-character masterpiece about a day in the life of a Brooklyn neighborhood should have come at the very tail end of the decade, effectively closing it out and ringing in the '90s. It's in the nature of its miraculousness, after all, that "Do the Right Thing" feels at once like a pensive final word and a lively leap towards the future.

Incandescently inspired as both director and screenwriter, Lee allows each scene in the film to bring further dizzying movement to its epic, country- and century-sized reckoning, yielding sobering insights by the minute yet never settling into anything so simple as a moral or a conclusion. It's an open-ended parable about race, class, gender, fear, anger, love, and hate, in New York City as well as the world. But mostly — and therein lies its genius — it is simply a perfect movie about a group of people.

• Cast: Spike Lee, Danny Aiello, Ossie Davis
• Director: Spike Lee
• Rating: R
• Runtime: 120 minutes
• Where to Watch: Netflix, Amazon Video (rent/buy), Apple TV (rent/buy)