The best '80s movies on Netflix

It’s hard to imagine anyone being more perfect for the Marty McFly role than Michael J. Fox. In Back To The Future, Fox is small and squinty and breezily charismatic. Fox was 24 when he shot the film, but he was so good at stammering disbelief that he easily passes as a high schooler. On top of that, Fox was already famous for playing Alex P. Keaton, a sort of avatar of Reagan youth. The central conceit of Family Ties was that the aging-hippie parents can’t understand how their son has become a square and uptight young Republican. In the ’80s, a big part of the Republican sales pitch was a return to ’50s values. Marty McFly and Alex P. Keaton are two very different characters, but there’s still something primally satisfying about seeing this kid go back to the ’50s and learn that ’50s values are not what he thought. [Tom Breihan]

Available May 1

Arriving four years after the original, Back To The Future Part II faced the difficult task of following one of the most beloved movies of the ’80s. And it’s successful, partly because it shifts focus. Whereas the original Back To The Future was, at its heart, a personal story about a kid learning to understand his parents, Part II is a straightforward time-travel adventure. Its shifting time-space continuum sends Doc Brown and Marty McFly to the future, then back to an alternate 1985, then back to the 1955 of the first film, with a trip to the Old West waiting in the wings. [Kyle Ryan]

Available May 1

For co-directors Jim Henson and Frank Oz, 1982's The Dark Crystal was a large, risky step away from their stable of familiar characters from Sesame Street, The Muppet Show, and the theatrical Muppet movies. Oz’s first feature and Henson’s second (after The Great Muppet Caper) began with the puppet techniques Henson and his Creature Shop had already refined, but the five-year filmmaking process was a constant process of creating and testing new materials, devices, and performance techniques to fully realize Henson’s storyline. The story involves a world where an evil race of sybaritic bird-monsters called Skekis rule over a magical purple crystal in a decaying castle. When a little elfin creature named Jen learns that he’s meant to fulfill a prophecy and end Skeksis rule, he begins a long, incident-filled hero’s journey toward their castle. Much of that trip simply seems designed to let Henson and Oz play with creatures and environments; the pacing is sometimes lumpy and the tone is portentous as Jen travels through landscapes richly appointed with exotic life, thanks to Froud’s fantasy designs. The story is a standard fairy-tale concoction, but the New Agey philosophy about healing and heroism makes for a classic Henson story, all heart and rapturous wonder at the world’s incredible possibilities. [Tasha Robinson]

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Steven Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial, now following Jaws in a pristine (though less revelatory) deluxe Blu-ray edition, draws on the director’s memories as a child of divorce, when he created an imaginary friend to keep him company. Spielberg and his screenwriter, Melissa Mathison, have channeled those memories into a open-hearted piece of storybook science fiction, but the fundamentals of E.T.—the reason why everyone talks about it making them cry—have nothing to do with the marvels of outer space and interstellar connection, or even the touching vulnerability of the creature itself, as it struggles to survive on an uninhabitable planet. The core theme of E.T. is home, and the journey of the film, taken in literal synchronicity by the young hero and his alien friend, is about them helping each other find it. It’s a common story told on a celestial scale. [Scott Tobias]

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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. [A.A. Dowd]

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It’s an old story: A group of young people go out into the forest with the best intentions, and a few hours later, they’re covered in blood and gore, and going for each other’s eyes. By now, The Evil Dead has been so picked apart by fans that it’s sometimes hard to separate the backstory from what happened onscreen. Thirty years ago, writer-director Sam Raimi, Bruce Campbell, and a host of others risked life and limb in the Tennessee woods to make a movie that would teach the world the dangers of reading aloud from anything with “of the Dead” in the title. In the decades since, Evil Dead has spawned two sequels, jumpstarted Raimi and Campbell’s careers, and become a cultural touchstone for horror fans in the video age. It’s been released on multiple formats, and been theatrically screened at midnight showings across the country. It’s practically an institution now. But how does it hold up as an actual movie? Not bad at all, really. [Zack Handlen]

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Christmas Vacation may be one of the most realistic, albeit exaggerated, cinematic depictions of what celebrating Christmas is like for many families. Where most holiday features are high-concept or supernatural, set pieces here involve shopping or sledding; even if you don’t blanket your house with lights like Clark, the trouble he has getting his decorations up and working is relatable, and funnier as a result. The film has become a perennial favorite, as important as It’s A Wonderful Life in many families’ December repertoires, because it shows the holidays as wonderful and taxing in equal measure. It understands the desire to be with extended family, but also the inherent frustration of sharing space with visitors and in accommodating everyone’s different schedules and tastes. (“I’ll be outside for… the season,” Clark decides as the in-laws descend.) Though it lacks scenes where the Griswolds attend holiday parties or bake cookies, this is about as close as Hollywood has gotten to putting everyday Christmas traditions on screen. In its sweetness and humor, this is the Vacation where John Hughes’ imprint is most visible. (He wrote the screenplay; the director is Jeremiah Chechik, who mostly does TV now.) [Ryan Vlastelica]

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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. [Noel Murray]

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