This is a list of the 120 highest-ranked films on Letterboxd in the decade of the 1980s, within certain qualifications, as of 18 February 2025.

To make a list like this meaningful, you need to set a threshold for numbers of ratings before including a film, mitigating the effect of spurious high ratings and helping ensure the rankings really do represent a significant consensus of viewers. The current threshold for the overall Letterboxd Top 250 is 15,000 ratings, but on average fewer people rate older films and with such a high bar the list would be heavily slanted towards well-known Hollywood productions with a good few interesting films excluded. So I've set a threshold of 3,000 to allow a sufficiently varied list, revised up from 1,500 in February 2025 in line with an overall increase in the number of ratings.

Another difference from the Letterboxd 250 is that I've included television material, shorts, documentaries and non-narrative films besides narrative features, though I've excluded series with more than 26 episodes even if one-offs, already a generous definition of a mini-series. And as of April 2022, from the 1980s list onwards I've excluded films and videos of live music, comedy and theatre, though I've made a few discretionary exceptions for examples that were released theatrically and are highly regarded as films in their own right, like Stop Making Sense (1984). I'm uncomfortable that this sounds arbitrary but the alternative is for later lists to include a significant proportion of material of this kind, which I'm sure most people have rated highly not for their inherent virtue as films/videos but for the live performance featured. I don't think their inclusion is particuarly useful in lists aimed primarily at film lovers.

See the notes for comments on a few multi-part entries.

There are 120 titles because I figure that the world's film industry should be able to manage at least one really great film per month on average.

This is one of a series of work-in-progress decade by decade lists along similar lines. See letterboxd.com/desdemoor/tag/highest-rated-by-decade/lists/

<- Back to 1970-1979.
-> Forward to 1990-1999.

Pedant's corner: I personally believe the 1980s began on 1 January 1981, but sadly most of the rest of the world seems to disagree with me, including Letterboxd. So to make life easier, all the films listed were released between 1980 and 1989 inclusive.

List first posted 1 April 2021.