The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

46. 1980 - The Empire Strikes Back

Star Wars The Empire Strikes Back Darth Vader
Lucasfilm

Honourable Mentions:The Blues Brothers,Raging Bull, The Shining

It is simply far too easy to forget that The Empire Strikes Back is a filmmaking masterpiece. Given all the decades of franchising, merchandising, spin-offs and of course Disney's fumbling attempts at renewing the series over the last decade, there's a tendency to place Star Wars within a different cinematic context - less so a series of films and more a product that has been leveraged to ludicrous success, fixed on a parallel track apart from its peers.

And given that 1980 also saw the release of The Shining and Raging Bull - two masterpieces from Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese - that sense of imposter syndrome could feel even more pronounced. Even so, while the two aforementioned films are among the greatest of the 20th century, it shouldn't be controversial to say that Irvin Kirshner's Star Wars sequel can sit quite happily alongside them.

The original Star Wars was a brilliant, operatic spectacle brought together by technical wizardry and pioneering effects work, but Empire brought those gifts to bear in a more structured and accomplished fashion. Today, it remains a transformational viewing experience - a testament to the immersive qualities of the medium, but one whose iconicity has frequently belied its filmic merit.

 
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WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.