The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

Honourable Mentions: Aliens, Blue Velvet, Ferris Bueller's Day Off

When it comes to the cinema of the Vietnam War, there is a "before" and "after" Oliver Stone's Platoon.

As the narrative goes, before, there was propaganda like John Wayne's The Green Berets and exaggerated depictions like Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter; after, there was Hamburger Hill, Dead Presidents, and Casualties of War.

A generalisation, of course, given the overall direction of travel with the genre at the time and the fact that Hamburger Hill - another raw and committed depiction of the conflict - premiered mere months after Platoon, but that shouldn't disabuse anyone of the fact that Stone's film is a unique beast of its own, a trailblazing text from a Vietnam veteran that made tangible a generation's sense of betrayal and innocence lost, as well as the director's own wartime experiences.

Platoon's iconicity has led to repeated parody over the years, but that hasn't dulled its edge. The feud between Willem Dafoe and Tom Berenger's Sgt. Elias and Sgt. Barnes, the use of Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings - Stone's film remains one of the eighties' most essential.