The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

45. 1981 - Thief

Thief 1981
United Artists

Honourable Mentions: Blow Out, Possession, Raiders of the Lost Ark

Few filmmakers have arrived on the scene so fully formed as Michael Mann did with Thief, a film which instantly distilled the director's enduring mix of urban spirituality and technical authenticity with a tidal wave of neon, Tangerine Dream, and a .45-wielding Jimmy Caan.

Thief is sensorially resplendent, but also boasts a compelling emotional and thematic throughline, of an angry, isolated professional yearning for an unattainable dream, and the exploitative forces working to capitalise on that one weakness. It's a film about the smiling face of capitalism and the ruthlessness that lies just behind it, as well as the twisted catharsis of self-destruction.

Caan's Frank burns everything down in his quest for revenge, which Mann executes in the mould of Donald Westlake and punctuates with a pulsating track performed by Craig Safan, as Frank unloads his pistol into a coalition of wrongdoers, before fading away like a shadow in the night.

An all-timer ending to an all-timer debut.

 
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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.