and Angel Heart (Ooooh! Alan Parker!)

As far as I'm concerned, the 80s were the best cinema decade.

There's been good movies since 2000? Who knew?!

The ones that easily come to mind...

Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi
Escape From New York
The first three Indiana Jones movies
The first three Rambo movies
Predator
Commando

I can't really say which is my favorite from that list.

Funny, for me it's the other way around. I could list a lot of movies from the 2000s that I liked 10x better than any movie from the 80s (and I grew up in the 80s).

Late 20s were great, when the silents peaked. "The Passion of Joan of Arc" and "Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans" are two of the best movies ever. 30s were iffy, due to talkies being so new. 40s were decent, 50s even more so, 60s (French New Wave!) were great, 70s were fine (No more Hayes Code in the US). 90s were great, partly because of many filmmakers from non-Japanese Asia (Wong Kar-wai, Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige...). "Noughties" were... OK.

Interestingly, the end of a decade seems to spawn better movies than the middle.

There were a lot of great movies made in the 80s. Here are some of my favourites lots of different genres. No particular order.

Scarface
Withnail and I
Night of The Comet
Killer Klowns from Outer Space
The Breakfast Club
The Brother from Another Planet
Dune
The Long Good Friday
48 Hours
The Return Of The Living Dead
Aliens
Escape from New York
Raging Bull
Pale Rider
The Terminator
Chariots of Fire
The Toxic Avenger
Class of 1984
Class of Nuke 'Em High
Blade Runner
Diner
Once Upon a Time in America
Planes, Trains and Automobiles
The Evil Dead
Die Hard
Alien Nation
Beverly Hills Cop
RoboCop
Wall Street
Friday the 13th

my favorite game from the 80s has to be the first might and magic.

and my favortie movies?

star wars,

robo cop(not so much recently becuase the violence really turns me off. you might call that strange becuase i play violent video games, but its not the violence i like, its the strategy)

ghostbusters,

and i used to love horror movies, of which the best of which came out in the 80's. but now i find them to be gross excesses of death.

Wolverines!

Oh and don't get me started on the french 80s, with the Richard/Depardieu/Veber/Cosma trilogy, and thrillers with Lino Ventura ("Espion Lève-toi") or Jean Poiret (Chabrol's Lavardin series), and Tavernier's "Coup de Torchon", Bilal's "Bunker Palace Hotel", and... okay, Verneuil's "I comme Icare" and Blier's "Buffet froid" are from 79, but still...

I love this thread!

Pale shadow of the late 50s, early 60s, though.

No order

Back To the Future/2, Scrooged, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, BeetleJuice, The Neverending Story, Prizzi's Honor, Ghostbusters/2, Return to Oz, The Last Starfighter, Tron, The Goonies, Robocop. Uncle Buck, Summer Rental, Time Bandits, The numerous classic Horror movies which have been mentioned, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Flight of the Navigator, Legend, Willow, Krull, The Land Before Time, Indiana Jones series, The Karate Kid, Little Shop of Horrors, Short Circuit/2, Weird Science, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Space Raiders, Police Academy, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Big Trouble in Little China, Romancing the Stone/The Jewel of the Nile, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, Cocoon/Cocoon: The Return, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan/Star Trek III: The Search for Spock/Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home/Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back/Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi, Harry and the Hendersons, A Christmas Story, The Secret of NIMH, All Dogs Go to Heaven, Revenge of the Nerds/2, Blade Runner, WarGames, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Weekend at Bernie's, The Breakfast Club, Adventures in Babysitting, Lethal Weapon/2, The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!, Beverly Hills Cop/2, Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior/Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Christmas Vacation

I disagree. When it comes to comedy, there was an ongoing tradition of very witty films that go from the 50s/60s all the way to the 80s, often with the same writers. There is a continuity from "le cave se rebiffe" (61) to "faut pas prendre les enfants du bon dieu pour des canards sauvages" (69) to "laisse aller c'est une valse" (71) to "buffet froid" (79) to "la chèvre" (81) or "les compères" (84)... These films are flawless, and their style is not extremely different - not to mention the same actors played the same way in many of them (Gabin, Ventura, Blier). Frankly, I don't see much of a difference of quality between "Cent mille dollars au soleil" (64) and "les morfalous" (84).

When it comes to serious movies, there was also a continuity of quality, with political or socail thrillers by Tavernier, Verneuil. Chabrol, Costa Gavras, etc. I actually find it difficult to identify the epoch of some of these movies, from the 70s to the 80s ("le secret", "i comme icare", "Z", etc), because their tones and qualities are very similar. The same despaired paranoia runs through them. The style evolves seamlessly. Would you say that "le cercle rouge" (70) is a pale shadow of the 50s ? Or that Pierre Granier-Deferre's movies plummeted in quality from the 60s to the 80s ?

The only thing that was lost, in my opinion, was the sheer poetic impact of films written by the likes of Prévert, Carné, Jeanson. This is a style and a tone that was lost (possibly killed by colours, even). It's like a dead genre. Still, when Jaoui and Bacri write a movie (or, technically, adapt one of their theatrical plays, but whatever), I take it to the guts with the same strength as an "Hôtel du Nord". And their "cuisine et dépendances" is from the early 90s. I admit they are a bit exceptionnal. But the guy who made "L'année dernière à Marienbad" in 61 made "Mon oncle d'Amérique" in 1980, and "Smoking/Non-smoking" and "On connaît la chanson" in the 90s.

I am fond of the 80s cinema mostly because of its specific easy-going action adventures comedies and thrillers, there was the 70s carelessness allied with icreased technical means. Things started taking themselves too seriously in the 90s, and started to feel too planned, to thought-of. I see the 90s was the start of the collapse towards post-modernism : self-awareness in a pretentious way, stuck between the daring not-giving-a-shit era ("Phantasm", "Buckaroo Banzai") and the self-irony and self-subversion that would follow. The 80s was the follow-up of the 70s liberation, with a tad more professionalism. Just enough to still feel sincere. I think that the 80s were the swan's song of the XXth century.

But these points may hold mostly for hollywoodian productions. What I'm getting at, it that I don't think you should oppose these decades that much, especially in french cinema. I agree that something has been lost during or after the 80s (a freedom of creativity when it comes to film productions : Tavernier was very vocal about how the production system of today would have made his own classic films impossible to produce nowadays). I'm very doubtful about a french golden age situated around the 50s/60s. There's marvels from that era, there are others from the following decades, and quite often in the exact same genre.

Mine were: Ghostbusters, Gremlins, Beetlejuice, Princess Bride, and Labyrinth. Just to name a few of my favorites. I must add, I do have a thing for 80s horror flix, no matter how cheesy!