An alleyway breakdown triggers a labyrinthine murder mystery in Ivan Passer’s atmospheric neonoir, a film maudit that Hoberman describes as a “premature critique of Reaganism.”

One of Brian De Palma’s greatest films and one of the great American films of the 1980s, Blow Out finds De Palma mixing a variety of political and genre elements into a hallucinatory thriller that builds to a shattering conclusion.

In Martin Scorsese’s iconic cringe comedy, Robert De Niro stars as Rupert Pupkin, a cheerful but deranged comic who aspires to get his big break on the late-night talk show hosted by Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis).

David Cronenberg’s seminal head trip, about a TV exec whose reality mutates into a televisual nightmare, ranks among the great explorations into technology, the media, and the human body.

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s breakout role came in this sword-and-sorcery box-office hit, as the titular muscleman hero who seeks revenge against the evil leader of a band of raiders.

Sylvester Stallone stars in this franchise-launching action thriller as Vietnam vet John Rambo, who travels to Washington state to visit an old war buddy. The trip takes a turn for the ultraviolent when the sadistic local authorities decide to make an example of him.

Tom Cruise’s breakout role was in this epochal paean to yuppie self-actualization as a high school student who has his parents’ house all to himself and soon finds himself running something resembling an underground brothel out of his suburban abode.

Returning from a hiatus during the Carter administration, Eastwood’s Dirty Harry was back for Reagan’s first term to track a serial killer—who is avenging her own rape—only to unwittingly become romantically involved with her.

A man unwittingly unleashes over-the-top violence and gleefully anarchic chaos into his quiet family-oriented suburb in Joe Dante’s classic perversion of the “Spielbergian fantasy of toys come to life.”

Schwarzenegger stars as the hyper-macho humanoid machine who travels back in time from a robot-ruled future to prevent the birth of the man who would go on to lead the human resistance.

Michael J. Fox gives an iconic turn as eighties teen Marty McFly, “an American Oedipus” who travels back in time to 1955 and inadvertently disrupts the budding romance between his teenage parents.

A spin on Jacques Rivette’s Celine and Julie Go Boating, this screwball romp starring Rosanna Arquette and Madonna was mainstream America’s introduction to the ’80s underground Bohemian scene in New York and to the Material Girl herself.

The uncanniness of the suburban everyday is plumbed with aw-shucks gusto in the Talking Heads lead singer’s directorial debut, in which he stars as a visitor to Virgil, Texas, a Reagan-era vision of utopia on the verge of its annual “Celebration of Specialness.”

Tim Burton’s feature debut finds the young director and actor-writer Paul Reubens laying the foundation for the “fully realized private universe” of iconic Saturday-morning TV series Pee-Wee’s Playhouse by way of a delirious nationwide search for Pee-Wee’s beloved ketchup-red bicycle.

Kathryn Bigelow’s second feature is a flamboyantly cool, cult-favorite genre hybrid, described by Hoberman as “a road film set in the Southwest with a ‘family’ of vampires who strongly suggest a Mansonesque hippie cult driving through Bonnie and Clyde country in a succession of stolen vans.”

Crispin Glover, Keanu Reeves, Ione Skye, and Dennis Hopper star in this enduring, nightmarish, and controversial vision of middle-class disaffection and a generation for whom Reagan’s “Morning in America” was in fact an endless night.

Oliver Stone’s directorial breakthrough came with his Oscar-nominated third feature, a vividly rendered war drama that draws no quarter in its criticism of the U.S.-backed Salvadoran junta.

One of Cox’s most gleefully incendiary films (scripted by Rudy Wurlitzer and scored by Joe Strummer), Walker stars Ed Harris as the 19th-century American mercenary William Walker, who briefly served as the president of Nicaragua.

Paul Verhoeven demonstrated his ability to deliver both genre thrills and serious social commentary in this prescient and disturbing look at the rise of the corporate police state, set in a dystopian, futuristic Detroit.

Set in a dystopian future in which the United States is a totalitarian state dominated by show business, this classic work of eminently ’80s sci-fi schlock stars Arnold Schwarzenegger as a contestant on a gladiatorial game show who “essentially turns Spartacus, leading a rebellion with a disco-MTV backbeat.”

Scorsese’s passion project, starring Willem Dafoe in one of his greatest performances as Jesus Christ, ranks among the most controversial American films released during Reagan’s second term.

“Rowdy” Roddy Piper stars in John Carpenter’s classic low-budget sci-fi allegory about the role of ideology in our unconscious daily lives, “the most anti-Reagan film ever to come out of Hollywood,” Lewis Beale noted in a profile of Carpenter at the time of the film’s release.

Join Film at Lincoln Center’s Director of Programming Dennis Lim and writer J. Hoberman for an expansive discussion about his latest book, Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan, the film series it inspired, the relationship between politics and pop culture in the 1980s, and more.