Movies From 1986

Fourteen films from one very good year. Ranked with total confidence and zero methodology.

Entries
14
Category
Film
Updated
  1. A giant knife over the Manhattan skyline, a red crocodile tail in the water

    14. Crocodile Dundee

    Peter Faiman · 1986

    Paul Hogan's bushman wanders into Manhattan and treats it like the outback. It was the second-biggest movie of the year in America, behind only Top Gun, and it got Hogan an Oscar nomination for the screenplay. That's not a knife. This is a knife.

  2. Three sombreros on a desert rock, red musical notes rising from a bush

    13. Three Amigos!

    John Landis · 1986

    Steve Martin, Chevy Chase and Martin Short play silent-film cowboys who think they've been booked for a show and have actually been hired to fight a real bandit. The singing bush. The plethora. Pure silliness, performed with total commitment.

  3. A circular maze with a red orb at its center and an owl above

    12. Labyrinth

    Jim Henson · 1986

    Jim Henson’s puppets, George Lucas producing, and David Bowie as a goblin king singing his own songs. A box-office flop that a whole generation watched on VHS until the tape wore out. Still unlike anything else.

  4. Lightning striking a sword in a highland ridge under a red sky

    11. Highlander

    Russell Mulcahy · 1986

    Immortal swordsmen chop their way across centuries until there can be only one. Christopher Lambert plays a Scot with a French accent; Sean Connery, a Scot, plays a Spaniard. Queen wrote the songs. It makes no sense and it absolutely rules.

  5. A big-rig truck in a Chinatown alley under red lanterns and lightning

    10. Big Trouble in Little China

    John Carpenter · 1986

    Kurt Russell plays a truck driver who thinks he’s the hero and is mostly the sidekick. It bombed in theaters and became a cult classic anyway. Ghosts, wizards and a man who won’t stop talking into his CB radio. Pure confidence.

  6. A red basketball dropping through a barn hoop beside a cornfield

    09. Hoosiers

    David Anspaugh · 1986

    Gene Hackman coaches a tiny Indiana high school team, loosely based on Milan’s 1954 title run. It’s every sports-movie cliché, done so sincerely you stop noticing. Dennis Hopper is great in this one too. Busy year for him.

  7. Helicopters over a jungle, dog tags on a branch, red smoke rising

    08. Platoon

    Oliver Stone · 1986

    Oliver Stone served in Vietnam and made the movie he lived through. It’s heavy, sweaty and hard to watch, which is the point. It won Best Picture and Best Director, and changed how Hollywood showed that war.

  8. A red bed ringed with candles in a loft facing the Brooklyn Bridge

    07. She's Gotta Have It

    Spike Lee · 1986

    Spike Lee's first feature, shot mostly in black and white in about two weeks on almost no money. Nola Darling juggles three men and refuses to apologize for it. It made Lee a name overnight and helped kick open the door for the indie Black filmmakers who followed.

  9. A red rose and a human ear on a lawn below a white picket fence

    06. Blue Velvet

    David Lynch · 1986

    Lynch peels back a perfect small town and finds something rotten underneath. Dennis Hopper’s Frank Booth is one of the scariest villains ever put on screen. Decades later it still feels like it shouldn’t exist.

  10. A red fly between two teleportation pods

    05. The Fly

    David Cronenberg · 1986

    Cronenberg remade a 1958 B-movie into a tragedy about a body falling apart. Jeff Goldblum is funny, then charming, then horrifying, sometimes in the same scene. It won the Oscar for makeup and earned every bit of it.

  11. A red convertible leaping over the Chicago skyline, a clock above

    04. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

    John Hughes · 1986

    A teenager skips school, borrows a Ferrari and hijacks a parade. It shouldn’t work. It works because Hughes treats one stolen day like the most important thing in the world. Which, at 17, it is.

  12. Four kids walking railroad tracks toward a trestle and a red sun

    03. Stand by Me

    Rob Reiner · 1986

    Based on a Stephen King novella, and somehow the least scary thing he ever wrote. Four kids walk a railroad track to find a body and find out who they are instead. Nobody has made a better movie about the end of being twelve.

  13. A motion tracker showing one red blip in a dark industrial corridor

    02. Aliens

    James Cameron · 1986

    Cameron took a haunted-house movie and turned it into a war movie without losing any of the dread. Sigourney Weaver got an Oscar nomination for an action role, which almost never happens. Every space-marine story since owes it rent.

  14. A fighter jet climbing on a red contrail above aviator sunglasses

    01. Top Gun

    Tony Scott · 1986

    Maybe the most 1986 movie of 1986. Aviators, volleyball, Kenny Loggins and real jets doing real things. It made Tom Cruise a fixed point in the culture, and a sequel 36 years later proved it.

Dishonorable mentions

  • A red electric guitar and a feathered hat before a city skyline, duck tracks below

    Howard the Duck

    Willard Huyck · 1986

    Produced by George Lucas, it gave the world a wisecracking duck from outer space and a romance with Lea Thompson nobody asked for. It shared the Razzie for Worst Picture. Some bad movies are accidents. This one took real effort.

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