I object, 1986 had the best movies:
Top Gun
Crocodile Dundee
Platoon
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
Back to School
Aliens
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
The Color of Money
An American Tail
Heartbreak Ridge
Peggy Sue Got Married
Little Shop of Horrors
Hoosiers
Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives
SSG Schwartz
The usual answer, and the correct one, is 1939:
Babes In Arms
Beau Geste
Dark Victory
Destry Rides Again
Drums Along the Mohawk
Gone with the Wind
Goodbye, Mr. Chips
Gunga Din
Gulliver’s Travels
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Ninotchka
Of Mice and Men
The Rules of the Game (La règle du jeu)
The Spy in Black
Stagecoach
Stanley and Livingstone
The Stars Look Down
The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle
The Wizard of Oz
The Women
Wuthering Heights
And the next few best years are probably in the 40s.
Utter balderdash, sir. Gone With the Wind is a classic, and will always be so. Goodbye, Mr. Chips is for its time quite good. Hardly “over rated.”
Oh, and your 1972 list is filled with several total stinkers, and a lot of movies no one even bothers to rent any more.
The OP list looks to me like any upcoming schedule on TBS. Red Dawn… really?
Since we’re throwing out lists I’ll submit (more or less at random) 1968
Barbarella
Bullitt
Faces
Funny Girl
The Lion in Winter
Night of the Living Dead
The Odd Couple
Once Upon a Time in the West
Oliver!
Planet of the Apes
The Producers
Romeo and Juliet
Rosemary’s Baby
The Thomas Crown Affair
2001: A Space Odyssey
Yellow Submarine
I think that the O.P.s list is more about what was fashionable,for whatever reasons at that time.
Some of the films mentioned were not only not classics but were total tripe.(I’m not intenionally trying to be offensive here so don’t take it personally)
IMO a classic is a film that stands the test of time,long after it has ceased to be perceived as trendy or innovative.
Off of the top of my head heres some of my ideas(though I’ll think of more later)though some of these are not to my personal taste.
The Maltese Falcon
Gone With the wind.
The private life of King Henry the Eighth
Brief Encounter
The Longest Day
The "Road"series with Bob Hope,Bing C and Dorothy Lamour.
Metropolis (FritzLang)
Platoon
The Wizard of Oz
Saving Private Ryan
The Marx brothers movies
Charlie Chaplins silents
The Keystone Cops
Shane
The magnificent Seven
The Seven Samurai
The Third Man
More to Follow.
Many of those movies were fun, but nearly half of them flat-out SUCKED, and VERY few have any claim to being “classics.”
If “Red Dawn” and “Buckaroo Banzai” are classics, we need a whole new word for “Citizen Kane.”
Buckaroo Banzai is a classic, albeit a cult classic.
I was going to come in and say this. 1982 was a great year for SF/Fantasy.
Besides the above, we had
**Firefox
Atomic Cocktail
Ordinary People
Annie
**
It also saw the re-release of Bambi
Other movies, not so great, were
Grease 2
Swamp Thing
Funhouse
Paradise
Although it had been released two years earlier, 1982 was the year Akira Kurasawa’s Kagemusha came to my town.
You know, cult classic would be a good term to refer to the next time someone gets all pissy about “conspiracy theory” not meaning the sum of its parts.
Ordinary People was released in 1980.