The best '80s movies to watch on Netflix right now

Harrison Ford plays a retired hunter of rogue replicants, humanoid robots used on Earth’s off-world colonies and prone to rebel against their programming in their attempts to emulate their creators. As consumer products, it’s surprising they’ve remained on the market, but as walking challenges to how we define our own humanity, they’re incredibly efficient. But they’re hardly the only such challenges. Ford inhabits a dystopian Los Angeles where black skies always drip with rain, neon advertisements constantly promise that happiness remains just one Cuisinart purchase away, and a privileged few make choices for the many, almost as if they were programming machines. That world, created out of miniatures, retrofitted backlots, and L.A.’s Bradbury building, remains Blade Runner’s most stunning achievement. Bathed in Vangelis’ synth-noir score, its dark future of overcrowded streets, ecological failure, and corporate domination looks hellish but familiar. []

For final shots of puzzling beauty, it’s possible that only 2001 rivals Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time In America, in which the credits roll over a freeze-frame of Robert De Niro’s face laughing at the ceiling of an opium den. Leone puts a veil of lace between his actor and the camera, but De Niro’s twisted smile captures a moment that sees through all veils, a flicker of understanding at the end of a film of ambiguities. Whether much of America, a seven-layer-dip of flashbacks within flashbacks, is in fact one long pipe dream extending out from that moment…remains open for debate, though there’s no denying the film’s dreamlike qualities. But whose dream is it? Ultimately, it belongs to Leone himself. []

Stephen King was in the thick of his most prolific and successful period as a writer when Doubleday published Pet Sematary—one of King’s darkest novels—in 1983. It was an old manuscript that King had started in the late ’70s and then put aside, finishing it only at his publisher’s insistence, though King has often claimed that he dropped the book because the subject matter was so depressing, and so terrifying. Riffing on W.W. Jacobs’ short story “The Monkey’s Paw,” Pet Sematary is about a doctor who moves his family to a small town in Maine, where he learns about a mystical burial ground that brings the dead back to life—albeit profoundly changed. The doc keeps finding reasons to use the cemetery, beginning when his daughter’s cat dies. Whatever the reason that King shelved the book, he’s right that it’s a grim piece of work even by his own standards, dealing with death not as an abstract horror but as something personal, tragic, and not to be taken lightly.Mary Lambert’s 1989 film version of Pet Sematary (from King’s own screenplay) has a difficult job to pull off, to get across the heavy emotional content of the book while telling a story that’s right out of EC Comics, with the dead shambling back. But Lambert has a couple of powerful weapons in her arsenal. She has the alternately kindly and creepy Fred Gwynne, playing a neighbor who helps the doctor (played by Dale Midkiff) understand the secret history of the place he now lives. And Lambert has Maine, a shooting location that King insisted upon when he sold the novel’s rights. The creaky houses, the cracking trees, and the busy highway—with its speeding trucks—all have an authentic quality, at once homey and potentially deadly. []

Before Coming To America, before The Nutty Professor, and long before Norbit, Eddie Murphy proved he could occupy the skin of multiple characters without the aid of elaborate prosthetic work. Raw, his 1987 blockbuster stand-up movie, remains the fullest showcase of the comedian’s gift for impression. Over a long, consistently hilarious set at Felt Forum in New York, Murphy imitates Michael Jackson, Mr. T, Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor, an Italian hothead, a Jamaican lothario, an African trophy wife, philandering guys, gold-digging women, and—in the film’s showstopper of a final bit—his own inebriated, self-aggrandizing father. He’s a one-man Saturday Night Live, and there’s a control of inflection and facial expression on display that marks Murphy as one of the great comics of his generation. It’s no wonder the full show was never released in an audio-only format. Simply hearing Eddie perform would do no justice to his animated, physical approach to the craft. []

In the first three minutes of She’s Gotta Have It, writer-director-star Spike Lee offers up a Zora Neale Hurston quote, a plaintive jazz score by his father Bill, artful photos of New York street life by his brother David, and sumptuous black-and-white footage of bridges and brownstones, shot by cinematographer Ernest Dickerson. In 1986, few American independent films looked and sounded as distinctive as She’s Gotta Have It, and Lee upped the ante further by seeming to promote a theretofore-unrecognized new Harlem Renaissance. From the jump, She’s Gotta Have It announced that it wasn’t going to define black life in terms of crime and poverty, just as it wasn’t going to bind independent filmmaking to moribund realism. Tracy Camilla Johns plays a young commercial artist juggling three boyfriends: genteel professional Tommy Redmond Hicks, preening model John Canada Terrell, and Lee, a livewire bike messenger. (Johns also has a predatory lesbian friend… best forgotten.) The movie tries to compensate for its lack of story by promising a frank look at female sexuality, but the title tells the tale: When it comes to its central idea, She’s Gotta Have It is more leering than revelatory. Luckily, Lee has more on his mind than just making some nebulous points about gender relations. She’s Gotta Have It is a calling-card film in the best sense of the term, in that it doesn’t just show what Lee can do, but what anyone can do. []

The waning days of young summer friendship are charted with incisive depth and wiseass humor in Stand By Me, Rob Reiner’s superlative dramatization of Stephen King’s novella “The Body.” As in its source material, Reiner’s story concerns four best friends who, on Labor Day weekend 1959, learn the whereabouts of the corpse of a missing schoolmate, and set out on foot through the forests and countryside that surround their Castle Rock, Oregon hometown to find it. Their story is one told in flashback by Gordie (Richard Dreyfuss as an adult, Wil Wheaton as a kid), who narrates his memories of this fateful trip alongside his three pals: Chris (River Phoenix), who’s seen by locales as a troublemaker thanks to his ne’er-do-well brother; Teddy (Corey Feldman), whose “loony” WWII vet father cruelly burned his ear and saddled him with a nutjob reputation; and Vern (Jerry O’Connell), the pudgy sidekick who suffers the brunt of Teddy, Chris, and Gordie’s profane jabs and insults.Theirs is a ribald, authentic rapport, full of name-calling, manhood challenges, and other assorted teasing and ridicule that rings true to the many ways boys bond through verbal abuse. In its campfire tales of puking, and its races to avoid being run over by speeding trains, the film proves to be a touching depiction of adolescent camaraderie. All four of them damaged by familial traumas—most clearly Gordie, whose parents have emotionally shut him out after the death of his favored older brother (John Cusack)—the four kids set out on their odyssey driven by a shared morbid curiosity. Yet Bruce A. Evans and Raynold Gideon’s script subtly suggests that what really motivates them all is an interest in confronting, first-hand, their own mortality. []

Midway through Top Gun, the highest-grossing movie of 1986, there’s a scene where the film briefly abandons all sense of narrative and plummets into a sort of ecstatic erotic delirium. Tom Cruise’s Maverick and Anthony Edwards’ Goose, our two heroes, play a game of glistening beach volleyball against Val Kilmer’s Iceman and Rick Rossovich’s Slider, their blood rivals. Director Tony Scott cuts the scene to a Kenny Loggins song called “Playing With The Boys.” For three minutes, the film takes a pause and just admires these oiled-up bodies, letting them flex and slap and grunt and shine. If you saw Top Gun at any kind of formative age, this scene is seared into your memory…Top Gun is a beautiful movie. Scott shoots everything possible in golden-hour light—insane red-streaked sunsets, faces silhouetted against skylines, sweat glinting off of every face, steam billowing everywhere. The film has a pulse, thanks to Harold Faltermeyer’s mythic synth score and the percolating Kenny Loggins and Berlin songs that Giorgio Moroder produced. When planes are in the sky, twirling and spinning and nosediving, physics almost cease to exist. It’s the most aesthetically arresting propaganda film ever created. []