best films of the 1980s

So in my spare time lately (I'm underemployed at the moment) I've been tinkering a lot with my Film Viewing database.

Basically what this means is "doing data entry"—entering and rating more and more films. It's fairly tedious work but somehow it's also engaging and engrossing. And the database as a whole is starting to get "robust"—it's starting to reach that sweet spot where I can command it to produce certain types of output, and get results that I feel are reasonably accurate. For instance, just as a test, I asked it to show me all the movies from the 1980s that I've given a rating of 8 or higher to (out of ten). I'm pretty pleased with the results, a list of 30 films which I think I could defend as the "best films of the 1980s."

Anyone want to have a good-natured argument about it? Anything I've left out? Anything I've wildly over-rated?

I chose the 80s more-or-less at random, and will happily present the results of a different decade upon request.

my 100 favorite films

As some of you might know, I've been maintaining a complicated Film Viewing database which contains an incomplete (but growing) list of basically every film I've ever seen. One of the fun aspects of doing this is that I've set up a filtered view of this database which selects the films that I've given a rating of 9 or 10 to... thus auto-deriving a list of my "favorite" films.

As of today, when I added Jane Campion's The Piano (1993) to the database, the number of films on the "favorites" page hit exactly 100. Check it out.

It's organized chronologically, and you'll notice that it skews a bit towards recent films, in part because the 2000s have been a pretty good decade for film and in part because this database primarily (although not exclusively) reflects films I've watched or re-watched in the past two years. That said, there are definitely some blind spots: I'm sure there were some masterpieces produced between 1944 and 1954, but I'm not sure I've seen them.

This list reflects my personal favorites, and not necessarily the films I'd consider "canonical," although there is some overlap. (My 100 canonical films list, which could use some revision around now, can be found here.)

Comments and suggestions are welcome...