I feel like it's hard to make 1980s film recommendations to millennials, who I'm pretty sure make up the vast majority of people who'll see this. We grew up with a lot of these films, we got recommended them by our parents and older relatives, and even a lot of the decade's bombs, like Blade Runner, The Thing, and Labyrinth, are now widely considered classics. So this top 10 list is going to be films that I rarely hear brought up or at least recommended. Not all of these are top tier stuff, but I think they're all worth watching.

And for those wondering why I'm skipping the 1970s, in my effort to finally build up my film literacy, that's a decade I still don't feel like I've explored enough to make a good list yet, but it's coming eventually.

Director John Boorman was six years old when the war began. By the time he was 8, his father had left to join the army, and the Blitz began to destroy the world he knew around him. In the 80s, he was an experienced director, and he decided to finally tell the story of what that was like in the only way that made sense to him: as a comedy. This film is an exploration of war through the eyes of someone old enough to think destruction is cool and exciting, but not quite old enough to understand its horrors, of what it's like to see a world you didn't like very much in the first place be torn apart, and what it was to live through the second world war when you weren't really fighting, but weren't separated from its consequences. A unique war film that doesn't feel like any other I've seen.

I feel like for some people, Urusei Yatsura begins and ends with the second film, Beautiful dreamer, which turns the wacky sitcom franchise into a one of the weirdest, most experimental animated films of the 1980s. But Mamoru Oshii had been directing Urusei Yatsura for quite a while before that, and his execution of that strange, wacky sitcom about the pervert guy accidentally engaged to an ill tempered alien princess gained a following for a reason. While they didn't yet give him the freedom he wanted with this film, this shows off exactly why this franchise was popular in the first place and why they'd trust Oshii enough to let him have complete free reigns with the follow up. It's not a meaningful movie, but it's a damn fun one.