100 Best Movies of 1985 Ranked (Clue)
The latest: The classic farcical whodunit Clue celebrates its 40th anniversary!
While 1985 has no shortage of highfalutin cinematic endeavors, it is equally defined by its brash, epic, and often counter-cultural crowd-pleasers. This 100 Best Movies guide highlights the top films of 1985 based on Tomatometer score, with Certified Fresh films first, followed by Fresh and Rotten movies with at least 1,000 user ratings on the Popcornmeter.
And a well-rounded year it was! Academy Award-winning drama The Trip to Bountiful shares room on the list with the gruesome, campy cult horror flick Re-Animator. Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure and To Live and Die in L.A. stand shoulder-to-shoulder as outstanding pieces of enduring art! Even Big Bird, Freddy Krueger, and James Bond make an appearance! (On the list. They unfortunately do not share the screen together.)
Throw on your Live Aid T-shirt, crack open a can of New Coke, and enjoy the journey through this eclectic list of motion pictures from 1985. (Tyler Lorenz)
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1985: An essential year in teen-centered movies!
Back to the Future is one of the most definitive blockbuster films in existence, and 1985 plays such a crucial role in the film’s plot, it could almost be a character. Teenager Marty McFly wants to get home to 1985 so bad, he’ll risk countless time paradoxes over three movies to do it! 1985 is the MacGuffin of the movie! Great Scott!
The Breakfast Club is a deeply important movie to the generation that came up the Brat Pack. It is one of the most parodied and quoted films in pop culture. The lyrics to “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” by Simple Minds are so intrinsically tied to the freeze-frame image of Judd Nelson at the end of the film, that they are ironically impossible to forget if you wanted to! But, its earnest depiction of high school tropes and its message about how our differences don’t make us enemies makes this John Hughes teen dramedy a lasting parable for all generations.
The only thing harder than being a teenager, is being a teenager with a bunch of bizarre, paranormal nonsense happening all around you! Teen Wolf, starring Michael J. Fox, explores the perils of puberty… if puberty also involves growing teeth and fur, and absolutely killing it on the basketball court. Once Bitten explores the value of virginity, and the peer pressure to lose it… that peer pressure coming from a 400 year old vampire countess threatening to drink your blood.
For more comical teen fair, don’t skip Just One of the Guys or Better Off Dead. If you need your heartstrings tugged on, watch St. Elmo’s Fire or The Legend of Billie Jean. And Porky’s… well, go ahead and decide for yourself what you are looking for out of Porky’s!
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You can’t speak of horror movie history without mentioning 1985’s gruesome cult hits: Stuart Gordon’s unapologetically gooey and gory B-movie classic Re-Animator, and Tom Holland’s vampiric special effects showcase Fright Night. Old fan-favorite icons are resurrected in A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge and Friday the 13th – A New Beginning. And, as if you could sleep after this selection of scary flicks, no movie fan should sleep on George A. Romero’s classic third zombie picture Day of the Dead!
Less spooky, but no less loaded with incredible special effects and stunts are the top action movies of 1985. Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Commando, and Rambo: First Blood Part II, like many action movies of the 80’s are a guaranteed adrenaline infusion. Jackie Chan delivers a kickass, acrobatic performance in the Hong Kong cop classic Police Story. Does a geriatric James Bond movie loaded with cheesy jokes sound like your idea of a good time? If A View to a Kill is your favorite 007 vehicle, it might be! And if it’s not, well, this standout 007 dud is a must-see entry in the enduring spy franchise. Even if it’s just for a laugh.
Some movies aim to be funny intentionally! Such is the case for unmissable comedies like Clue and Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. Two movies with styles that shook up the genre. If a blend of adventure and comedy are up your alley, you can’t skip Steven Spielberg and Chris Columbus’s kid-led treasure hunting caper The Goonies, or Michael Douglass and Kathleen Turner’s romantic treasure-hunting romp The Jewel of the Nile. Man, it was a good year for pirate themed adventures…
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Sydney Pollack’s Out of Africa was 1985’s Oscar darling with seven trophies: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, Best Original Score, and Best Sound.
William Hurt took home Best Actor gold for Kiss of the Spider Woman, edging out Harrison Ford for Witness (his sole Oscar nom ever) and Jack Nicholson in Prizzi’s Honor, while Geraldine Page took home the gold for Best Actress in The Trip to Bountiful over Whoopi Goldberg in The Color Purple and Jessica Lange in Sweet Dreams.
Special effects fans will note that Eric Stoltz’s cosmetic transformation in MASK won the Oscar for Best Makeup, while the eerie alien images in Cocoon won the Visual Effects Oscar.
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Japan delivered some of the year’s biggest artistic heavy hitters. Juzo Itami’s ramen comedy Tampopo endures as a beautiful and hilarious ode to Japanese food and culture. Film legend Akira Kurosawa served up a Japanese adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear with Ran, which won the Costume Design Oscar on top of four nominations. And, while not an award-winning film, the animated post-nuclear fallout dark fantasy romance movie Vampire Hunter D earned its place in the annals of anime history.
