The Top 10 Movies of 1989
The end of the 1980s, in movie terms, was a swan song of sequels, sci-fi, and sentimentality. Indiana Jones rode again, James Cameron dived deep, and John Cusack held a boom box above his head for one of the most enduring images of 1980s popular culture. Four of the movies in Flickchart’s Top 10 for 1989 were also among the 10 highest-grossing films of the year, but only one was nominated for Best Picture, signifying that the divergence between critical and popular opinion was by this time quite wide. Thankfully, audience tastes were not monolithic. This list includes two foreign films (though many young viewers couldn’t have known that about the animated Ghibli movie), a teen romance, adventure and science fiction, a superhero classic, and morality plays from Spike Lee and Woody Allen.
10. The Abyss
Submarine movies have been around forever, but The Abyss made them new again. It was a submarine adventure for a new generation, for people who didn’t necessarily remember the Silent Service whose feats of derring-do were the focus of underwater war movie classics like Torpedo Run, Up Periscope, and Hellcats of the Navy. In fact, it’s not a war movie at all; it’s a science fiction story with futuristic biotechnology and aliens and all that. And OK, if you really want to split hairs, Deep Core isn’t a submarine, it’s an underwater oil drilling rig. All the same, the personal dramas that play out in its pressurized quarters are familiar to people who have seen a submarine flick or two. What’s not familiar is where the movie ends up. James Cameron can play it straight, as in Titanic, or he can explore new worlds, as in his ongoing Avatar series, and in The Abyss he does both at once. The lengthy ending to the nearly three-hour directors’ cut is the kind of optimistic, awe-inspiring sci-fi that came to the fore in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, and seeing its meaning dawn on Ed Harris while his steely resilience turns to starry-eyed wonder is worth the time it takes to get there. – David Conrad
- Global rank: 715
- Wins 48% of matchups
- 20,835 users have ranked it
- 22 users have it at #1
- 626 have it in their top 20
9. Say Anything…
There are several defining images of popular American 80s cinema, and John Cusack lifting a boombox blasting Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes” is certainly among them. Say Anything… helped cement Cusack as a unique figure in the 80’s dichotomy: the awkward heartthrob. Cameron Crowe’s tale was in many ways a retelling of the same “divided by class” romance that has been told throughout the centuries, but it avoids many of the tropes that dominate the genre. Cusack and Ione Skye bring something unique to their characters, cementing them in a realism that lets you connect intimately with them as people. There is something uniquely 1989 about this film. Cusack might come across annoyingly hipster-ish if the movie had been made in the 2000s or later, but here he comes across as just a guy being true to himself. Crowe hasn’t fully recaptured the emotional truths of this movie since, making Say Anything… his masterpiece. – Connor Adamson
- Global rank: 595
- Wins 50% of matchups
- 8868 users have ranked it
- 21 users have it at #1
- 258 have it in their top 20
8. Kiki’s Delivery Service
Most Hero’s Quest stories take ordinary people and put them in unusual, often magical, situations where they unexpectedly thrive. Kiki’s Delivery Service does exactly the opposite. A young witch from a witch community that we glimpse in a fleeting opener travels to a non-magical town and has to make a living as a more-or-less normal person with a more-or-less normal job. That inversion is what makes Kiki’s Delivery Service possibly the most relatable of all coming-of-age adventure movies. Kiki’s growing-up process is the process of learning that she’s not particularly special. Sure, she can fly on a broom and understand her cat’s speech, but so what? She still has to get up in the morning, clock in at her job, and deliver packages all day to pain-in-the-butt customers. Her non-witch friend Ursula, a painter who’s just a few years older than her, actually seems to live an even more enchanted life than Kiki, without the help of magic. Thanks to Kiki’s strong female role models — a best friend, a hardworking mother figure, and a gentle grandmother figure — she figures out how to adapt to her new environment without completely losing her sense of self. – David
- Global rank: 534
- Wins 56% of matchups
- 3226 users have ranked it
- 16 users have it at #1
- 193 have it in their top 20
7. The Killer
The highly successful collaboration between director John Woo and star Chow Yun-Fat hit its peak in 1989 with The Killer. More propulsive than their A Better Tomorrow, with greater emotional and narrative depth than their Hard Boiled, this is the film that cemented their legacy. If I was to do one of those conspiracy-theory bulletin boards tracing the history of action cinema, with bits of red string connecting every film to those that influenced it and which it influenced, there would be a major nexus right at this movie. Rarely have filmmakers so successfully mixed everything that came before to have such influence on everything that came after. Woo took Jean-Pierre Melville’s style and Sam Peckinpah’s excess, a touch of Chang Cheh’s vision of masculinity and John Ford’s doomed search for redemption, and then poured (literally) 100,000 bullets over the whole thing. The resulting concoction would be reheated and served up by action directors across the world throughout the 90s. Quentin Tarantino was definitely paying attention during the film’s best sequence, where Chow and Danny Lee hold guns on each other while pretending (to Chow’s blind love interest) to be old friends. Luc Besson and the Wachowskis were only the best-known directors who inserted copies of Chow’s Ah Jong into their movies, and Michael Bay earned billions extrapolating an entire aesthetic from Woo’s swooping camera and slow-motion bullet ballet. All this means that watching The Killer could be considered homework for an action-movie fan, but it’s a sweet assignment: breath-taking, heart-breaking, and exhilarating. – Rick Winters
- Global rank: 507
- Wins 62% of matchups
- 1456 users have ranked it
- 5 users have it at #1
- 60 have it in their top 20
6. Dead Poets Society
Several entries on this list are notably divisive rather than universally loved, but none attract more criticism than Dead Poets Society. Roger Ebert called it “a collection of pious platitudes masquerading as a courageous stand.” It’s possible to agree with that criticism and still come away from the movie feeling inspired. The movie’s emotional arc is as rigged and unnatural as it is vague: a prep school teacher (Robin Williams) whom we are told is unorthodox and charismatic (he doesn’t really do anything to justify those descriptors) convinces a bunch of snarky boys to care about poetry through sheer will-power and meaningful looks. There’s a suicide, which the administration blames on the teacher’s disruptive influence, but that’s just there to create drama and antagonists where really there should be none. This movie should be a quiet, cozy story, free of Screenwriting 101 cliches. Yet, ultimately, that’s all beside the point, because what Dead Poets Society achieves amid its posturing is to open the door for boys to admit to liking poetry and caring about people. Young boys, and often the men they become, are big into posturing, so the movie’s lowest-denominator approach is arguably necessary for it to connect with that audience. They’re also big into not caring, though often they secretly do care, or want to care, which is why this movie works for so well for many people. In our minds we’re all standing on that table, part of a phalanx in an army of caring. We just need a little encouragement and maybe a martyr or two to show the way. – David
- Global rank: 338
- Wins 51% of matchups
- 66,139 users have ranked it
- 528 users have it at #1
- 9206 have it in their top 20
5. Do the Right Thing
Spike Lee rang loud and true with his searing, funny, and still impactful dramedy about a hot summer in New York City. Calling Do the Right Thing a dramedy almost seems to undercut the seriousness of the film, but Lee’s wry and dark humor rings throughout. His commentary on race in America is still painfully relevant today in many ways, but Lee’s vision works outside of pontification on social issues. The fantastic character work in Do the Right Thing for roles played by John Turturro, Danny Aiello, Giancarlo Esposito, Bill Nunn, and Lee himself lay out a landscape of the city. A block is brought to life by its people. The film offers no easily-distilled problems or simple solutions to the questions it raises, but through its relationships we experience a fully-realized commentary on race that’s more powerful than a social media tirade. Lee’s approach is at times heavy-handed, and some of the events he depicts are uncomfortable, but the film still feels balanced, and a keen sense of pacing and editing make it resonate. Do the right thing and watch it. – Connor
- Global rank: 313
- Wins 52% of matchups
- 7435 users have ranked it
- 22 users have it at #1
- 395 have it in their top 20
4. Crimes and Misdemeanors
As with Manhattan in our blog post about the top films of 1979, in this post we have to write about yet another Woody Allen movie that seems an awful lot like a mea culpa. Crimes and Misdemeanors has a remarkable cast: Anjelica Huston, Claire Bloom, Sam Waterston, Jerry Orbach (casting Waterston and Orbach, the classic Law & Order duo, in a movie called Crimes and Misdemeanors is a neat Easter egg), Alan Alda, Martin Landau, and of course Woody Allen and Mia Farrow, staples of this period of Allen’s filmography. The story it tells is deeper than Manhattan‘s, following two vaguely-connected storylines about major crimes and minor indiscretions, all of which stem from the characters’ romantic problems. There is a strong, dark commentary in Landau’s storyline about how wealthy and powerful people can rationalize any action as long as it protects their status, and dark gets darker at the end when a disembodied monologue suggests that the indifferent universe contains no divine or karmic punishment for people like that. For Allen, that “dark” thought is probably a relief. That probability inevitably colors all of this movie’s high-minded talk, which is fairly interesting in a vacuum — especially considering that the movie is about a vacuum, the vacuum of the moral universe, whose non-arc bends neither toward justice nor away from it. – David
- Global rank: 293
- Wins 55% of matchups
- 2997 users have ranked it
- 13 users have it at #1
- 130 have it in their top 20
3. Batman
That Batman ever got made in the first place is weird, and the fact that it’s still considered a superhero movie benchmark is even weirder. Outside of comic book stores that no respectable people entered in the 1980s, the last time anyone had heard from the Caped Crusader was the intentionally jokey 1960s TV series, which for all intents and purposes was a live-action cartoon. Doing Batman “dark” was a new concept to most people. Putting A-lister Jack Nicholson, known for his skeevy scumbag roles, in the old Cesar Romero clown makeup must have been a brain-breaker. But it’s hard to remember, because Jack’s Joker and the entire movie became so iconic that many people still cite this as their favorite Batman adaptation. That’s in spite of the fact that what once seemed dark now seems almost as silly as the Adam West series. Tim Burton’s aesthetic gives Gotham a kind of candy sheen, like a Halloween treat. Billy Dee Williams as Harvey Dent is as campy and enjoyable as he always is, but he’s not exactly the kind to strike fear in your heart. And Michael Keaton, cool as he is, is not the most intimidating man ever to don the batsuit. Batman 89’s appeal is inextricably bound to nostalgia, and that’s a powerful enough force to keep it at the top of lists like this despite its retrospective corniness and the steady drop-off in quality that its sequels suffered for the rest of the 20th century. – David
- Global rank: 247
- Wins 52% of matchups
- 84,846 users have ranked it
- 491 users have it at #1
- 10,707 have it in their top 20
2. Back to the Future Part II
It’s now fairly common for filmmakers to try to change the historical record. Coppola won’t stop recutting Apocalypse Now, Lucas’s changes to Star Wars ’77 are somehow, against all logic, still ongoing, Spielberg’s E.T. puppet has been replaced with a CGI abomination, et cetera, et cetera. Often, the purpose of these changes is to replace and even to erase what came before. But when Robert Zemeckis changed Back to the Future by making a sequel that takes place in the same spacetime, he played fair. Back to the Future Part II‘s plot jumps backwards and forwards and tests different possible outcomes to the story of the first movie, but its best sequences are the ones that exactly overlay the first movie’s scenes like a sheet of tracing paper. The new scenes derive their meaning from the old scenes, and the trick is to make them work as a single scene without anything breaking. The most seamless example is the scene at the high school dance when a time-traveling Marty has to sneak around the stage where his other time-traveling self from the first movie is playing “Johnny B. Goode.” It’s easy to see where Zemeckis uses body doubles instead of special effects to achieve this trick, but that’s part of what makes it such an impressive feat: he makes it look like there are new things going on in the climactic scene from the original movie even though we know that Part I will still look the same when we go back and watch it. When we do, though, we carry knowledge from the future back with us. Nothing is removed or replaced, simply added. – David
- Global rank: 176
- Wins 56% of matchups
- 88,688 users have ranked it
- 778 users have it at #1
- 13,569 have it in their top 20
1. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
Here are a few reasons why some of us think Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is the best film in the franchise: Sean Connery, the perfect ending shot, an expertly-balanced tone of comedy and danger, and effectively bringing Indy’s story to a close. Sean Connery as Indiana’s father is a fantastic casting move, and he has a fantastic rapport with Harrison Ford, keeping him honest as an archaeologist and a character. While some complain that Last Crusade is overly comedic or goofy, Spielberg finds a way to bring levity to the series while still maintaining the sense of danger established in Raiders and Temple. Indy is brought face to face with none other than Hitler in this film, and the evil of the Nazis is represented by their literal destruction of knowledge, which the Jones men are always fighting to protect. The weaknesses of Indy’s Nazi foes are brought to the fore in an epic finale in which Indy survives a Biblical trial as his enemies each succumb to their sins. Last Crusade wields the now-classic Indiana Jones tropes with perfection, and it delivers a perfect send-off to the series as the silhouettes of Indiana, his father, and their friends ride off into the sunset. We’ll just pretend the other sequels didn’t happen. – Connor
- Global rank: 21
- Wins 67% of matchups
- 88,957 users have ranked it
- 1075 users have it at #1
- 17,923 have it in their top 20
I’m surprised that Oliver Stone’s best film, Born on the Fourth of July, isn’t on the list.