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.

I've been watching a lot of old, classic movies over the last few years, largely through collecting laserdiscs, and I've found it really rewarding. So like with the 1940s and 1950s, I'm going to give my top 10 film recommendations for this decade. My knowledge of this decade's films is far from exhaustive, and I don't have any kind of film studies background or anything, but hopefully I can convince you that at least 1 or 2 of these films is worth watching.

So over the last few years, I've been exploring those old, classic films that I was told I was supposed to see, but never gotten around to, largely through laserdisc collecting. I've found it really rewarding, and people liked my list of 1940s films, so I figured I'd give you another decade's worth of films that I think are worth watching.

Edit: So after I started this, I realized I was missing a film that should have been on this list. So fuck it, it's a top 11 now.

I got myself a laserdisc player a few years ago to stream and preserve some interactive disks, then I started collecting anime on it, then I decided to use it to check out some of those old films I'd always heard I'm supposed to watch, but never did. I was legitimately surprised by how much I got out of this, to the point where it's starting to make me angry that it's hard to find films this old on mainstream streaming services. In any case, I'm far from a film scholar, and what I've seen isn't close to exhaustive (for instance, I haven't yet gotten around to The Magnificent Ambersons, though I have a copy coming in the mail), but over the next day or two, I want to share which movies of that decade I think are worth seeing and why.