The Best Films of Our Years

[Rowdy Roddy McDowall]

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[Admiral Shran]

Best decade? The 80s. No competition.

Best year? 1987

Adventures in Babysitting, *batteries not included, Beverly Hills Cop 2, Can't Buy Me Love, Death Wish 4, Dirty Dancing, Dragnet, Ernest Goes to Camp, Evil Dead 2, Fatal Attraction, Full Metal Jacket, Good Morning Vietnam, Harry and the Hendersons, Innerspace, La Bamba, Lethal Weapon, The Living Daylights, The Lost Boys, Man On Fire, Mannequin, Masters of the Universe, Moonstruck, Over the Top, Overboard, Planes Trains and Automobiles, Predator, The Princess Bride, The Principle, Project X, Raising Arizona, Revenge of the Nerds 2, RoboCop, The Running Man, The Secret of My Success, Some Kind of Wonderful, Spaceballs, Stakeout, Summer School, Three Men and a Baby, Throw Momma from the Train, The Untouchables, Wall Street, Who's That Girl, The Witches of Eastwick

God, I wish I had been old enough back then to go to the movies regularly.

 

[UnknownSample]

1960s and first half of 1970s. If you're unmainstream. The big ones for me : Dr Strangelove, 2001, Harold and Maude , The Lion In Winter, The Man Who Would Be King , Planet of the Apes, Silent Running...

 

[JirinPanthosa]

Best decade is 70s as it had films like Taxi Driver, Chinatown, Annie Hall, etc. Building on the experimental wave of the 60s and starting to use films to criticize social norms more.

Not to mention three of Tarkovsky's best.

Hard to choose a best individual year. 1966 maybe, with Persona, Andrei Rublev, Au Hasard Balthasar, The Good The Bad And The Ugly, Chimes At Midnight.

More recently 1994, with Pulp Fiction, Satantango and Chungking Express.

 

[Push The Button]

I vote for the 80's, though I used to visit the local movie theater about once a week back then, and cable TV movie channels filled in the gaps. But this was the decade that gave us The Wrath of Khan, Blade Runner, The Road Warrior, Back To The Future, The Thing, The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark..the list goes on and on.

I rarely watch movies at an actual theater anymore, unless it is something that I really really want to see like SW:TFA or other geek-event type films like it.

 

[J.T.B.]

I'll go with the 1970s as the best decade. Friedkin, Scorsese, Coppola, Spielberg, Lucas, Allen, Bogdanovich, Lumet, Ashby, Altman in their prime, Kubrick, Bergman, Fellini still doing great stuff.

It's hard to top 1939, but I've always been partial to 1948, personally:


The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Fort Apache
Red River
Hamlet (Olivier)
Macbeth (Welles)
Bicycle Thieves
Key Largo
Rope
The Naked City
The Red Shoes
Call Northside 777
Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House
A Foreign Affair
The Big Clock
Easter Parade

 

[Tosk]

The '80s is my favorite film decade. While it'd be hard to pick a single year, Star Trek II, Blade Runner, ET, The Thing, and Poltergeist all came out in June 1982. That sounds like a pretty good month to go to the movies. (Also Annie and Firefox, but they aren't firm faves like the other five.)

 

[Kai "the spy"]

I haven't thought nearly enough about this to actually judge any decade or year "the best" or even "my favorite". So, I just looked up my birth-year, 1984:

Footloose, This is Spinal Tap, Splash, Police Academy, Greystoke - The Legend of Tarzan, Romancing the Stone, The Bounty (the Hopkins/Gibson version), Indiana Jones & the Temple of Doom, Once upon a Time in America, Star Trek III, Ghostbusters, Gremlins, Top Secret!, The Karate Kid, The Last Starfighter, The Muppets take Manhattan, Purple Rain, The Philadelphia Experiment, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, C.H.U.D., Amadeus, All of Me, 1984, The Terminator, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Beverly Hills Cop, 2010, Dune, Starman, The Cotton Club, Godzilla (1984), The Never-Ending Story

Not to shabby.

 

[gblews]

Best decade is 70s as it had films like Taxi Driver, Chinatown, Annie Hall, etc. .

Don't forget "Network".

70's was a great movie decade.

 

[Antonovus]

Let us give some credit to our present decade with its Tarantino hits, good Superhero movies, and Star-Trek Into Darkness. However, I think this decade is doing better so far with television than film.

Ultimately, I have to agree with the majority of the aforementioned posts that the 80s holds the trump card for best films.

 

[RAMA]

Most people think the decade they grew up in and started seeing movies is the best one. For me, I grew up in the 80s, but there are also a lot of horrendous films in that decade. Last night i watched Trading Places and it still holds up.

The 70: Some great iconic movies but the style of movies is so different now, I find myself thinking they seem so outdated, I rarely watch them anymore.

When I was a kid, the 60s movies seemed so adventuresome..they were huge epics in the last big studio system era of Hollywood. War films, HG Wells and Verne adaptations, Musicals, disaster epics, cold war spies...Star Trek was spawned out of that adventure.

Ultimately, I wind up watching modern movies with my wife. Maybe our sensibilities are firmly grounded in the present. I have a tough time getting her to watch movies from pre-2000, even the 90s...I still feel we've gotten the best mix of movies since the 90s.

 

[J.T.B.]

Yeah, '76 was a really strong year. I would put Network and Taxi Driver at the top (hard to pick between them), followed by Bound For Glory, All The President's Men, The Shootist and The Outlaw Josey Wales. The Man Who Fell to Earth is flawed but gets a long way on its unique vision. Carrie and The Omen also very strong.

Network is one of those movies that seems unusually prescient for its time, like A Face in the Crowd. And, I think, 1995's To Die For.