Best Films of the 1980s, Ranked by IQ Score

The 1980s in American film is the decade most commonly miscategorized as 'commercial overreach' by critics who remember the marketing more than the work. The rubric reads the actual filmography: Raging Bull (1980), The Shining (1980), Blade Runner (1982), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Aliens (1986), and the late-decade Scorsese-Lynch-Coens emergence all happened in the same ten years.

The IQ Scores below reflect what the structural ambition supports. The Spielberg-Lucas commercial work is given its proper genre credit; the more experimental work (Lynch, Jarmusch, the Coens' Blood Simple debut) is read as the formal-rigor it was. Several of the era's Masterclass entries — particularly Wim Wenders's Paris, Texas and Akira Kurosawa's Ran — are rarely included in retrospective rankings that focus on American box-office.