The Defining Film of Each Decade

Movies have been part of popular culture since the turn of the 20^th century, and people have been happily debating the merits of their favorite pictures ever since. In the interest of history, let’s take a look back at the most iconic films from each decade, starting with the 1920s and extending through today!

1920s: Metropolis

Metropolis was one of the first feature-length sci-fi films and basically pioneered the look and feel of a “futuristic” movie. Its stellar sets, art deco designs, and gripping cinematography might all look dated now, but the impact it had on the broader world of cinema can’t be understated. The movie’s production crew created special effects techniques that made sci-fi as a genre much easier (and more impressive!) to film.

1930s: The Wizard of Oz

The Wizard of Oz is such a classic of movie magic that it pretty much still holds up to this day. Fantasy movies were still quite novel in the 30s, so this film’s approach to creating an imaginary place full of witches and dwarves became the blueprint for many fantasy movies to follow.

1940s: Citizen Kane

If you ask the average person to give their “safest” answer to the question “what’s the best movie of all time?” they’ll usually say Citizen Kane. While that non-answer has kind of fallen out of fashion, the movie is inarguably a masterpiece and helped to popularize camera angles, intercuts, and other cinematographic techniques still employed to this day.

1950s: Twelve Angry Men

Twelve Angry Men is a movie that takes place all in one room. That might make it sound boring. It’s far from boring, though, as it has some of the best written dialogue of any movie from its era. As the characters debate factors like truth, the nature of reality, and justice, the camera work subtly boxes them in and turns the jury deliberation chambers into a pressure cooker.

1960s: 2001: A Space Odyssey

Kubrick’s masterful 2001: A Space Odyssey has a lot to say. It essentially comments on the whole of human civilization, our role among the stars, and what our future as a species could look like. It’s also a visually stunning movie that set the standard for sci-fi for decades to come.

1970s: Star Wars

Maybe Star Wars isn’t high art, but it’s important. It’s impossible to overstate the cultural impact of George Lucas’s space fantasy about a farmer from Tatooine. In the 70s, you could find everything from Star Wars toys and lunch boxes to bed sheets and tie-in food promotions. Star Wars might not have won the Academy Award for Best Picture, but it did usher in the modern era of merchandising.

1980s: Back to the Future

Back to the Future is the single best time-travel movie ever made. It’s got a deceptively simple plot that loops in on itself and uses every last minute of its runtime economically. From fun background details in its parallel time periods to its rousing score, this is the 80s movie against which all others should be compared.

1990s: Pulp Fiction

Quentin Tarantino took everything he loved about movies and remixed it into the shiny, bloody gangster film Pulp Fiction. John Travolta plays a reconfigured version of the heartthrob dancer he’s always been, now compromised by a life of crime and a serious addiction. All the while, classic tunes from the 60s and 70s punctuate lengthy, rambling dialogue and mindless violence. It’s a uniquely American milieu, concerned more with the look and feel of the cinema than anything based in reality.

2000s: The Dark Knight

Christopher Nolan has been a defining filmmaker for the past 20 years, and his most iconic film of the 00s is easily The Dark Knight. The movie is best remembered as the final appearance of Heath Ledger as the Joker, a role he played to such perfection that it’s the new bar for the character. The Dark Knight ruminates on order and chaos and questions the morals that make civilized society tick, all while providing bone-crunching action and a healthy dose of superhero awesomeness.

The Social Network is a strangely vital movie to understanding the age of social media. Jesse Eisenberg’s nuanced take on Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is the quintessential image of the 2010s, and the movie is oddly prescient when it comes to issues of privacy, misinformation, and monocultural domination.

2020s (So Far): Oppenheimer

Nolan just keeps making iconic movies. Oppenheimer, along with Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, has become one of the most critically acclaimed movies of the 2020s. The grim, brooding atmosphere of the film takes a long look at the soul of the man who helped create the first atomic weapons. That legacy of destruction and the specter of annihilation loom over Cillian Murphy’s performance and color the entire film as a dire warning to future generations.