The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

39. 1987 - Matewan

Matewan
Cinecom Pictures

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.

 
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Content Producer/Presenter

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.