The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

39. 1987 - Matewan

Honourable Mentions:  Evil Dead II, Predator, The Princess Bride

John Sayles' Matewan is essentially eighties kryptonite - a long, fiery parable about one of the darkest chapters in America's capitalist history and the moment the dying embers of the Old West rose to meet it.

Sayles has regularly returned to the theme of a corrupted American past with his films - most notably in Eight Men Out and Lone Star - but Matewan remains his crowning achievement. Set during the West Virginia coal wars, in which striking miners and local law enforcement came up against the power of the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency and (eventually) the US Army, Sayles' film brought together the likes of Chris Cooper, James Earl Jones and David Straithairn for a teal-toned tragedy that confronted the foundational narratives on which a destructive new economic era was laid upon.

The historical allegory is uniquely gripping, but it's also the case that Matewan's value is propelled by its subject matter being so inherently fascinating. It's a story of gunfighters, organised labour, solidarity, and resistance set during a period conventionally characterised by excess, urbanity and post-war prosperity. In that sense, Sayles' film lays bare the inconvenient proximity of history and does so to anguished completion, delivering a finale without solace or mercy, but one that invigorates all the same.