Movies are visual time capsules. We can watch them years later and instantly be transported to another time and place. It might be a time that we once knew, feeding us nostalgia and sentimentality. Or it could be a time that we never experienced ourselves, though we might feel like we know it now thanks to the movie on our screen. Some films perfectly capture their decade. The soundtracks, the look and feel, the themes, even the movie’s stars — these aspects often reflect the times in which these films were made.
Let’s go back in time, starting with the 50s, and take a look at ten films that perfectly encapsulated their decade.
10 Rebel Without a Cause (1955)
Rebel Without a Cause is a quintessential 1950s film. Before this, films mostly captured picture-perfect families and households. Rebel Without a Cause focused on dysfunctional families and the troubled suburban youth of the time, highlighting the differences and conflicts between generations. It included high school car races and 1950s fashion, like leather jackets and slicked back hairstyles. It also starred James Dean who, with his good looks and signature swag, was Hollywood’s biggest actor in the 50s. Since his untimely death, he’s been immortalized as one of Hollywood’s most legendary stars.
9 Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
Although Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde is set during the 1930s, its style and execution reeks of the 1960s. Counter-culture and sex were distinct characteristics of this decade. Bonnie and Clyde reflects both, following the love story of two disillusioned youths, Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway) and Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty), as they embark on a rebellious crime spree. It glamorizes the gangsters’ murderous romance by blending violence with sex, being the first film to do so. This approach had a major impact on Hollywood and inspired filmmakers to be more open to including sex and violence in their movies. Bonnie and Clyde isn’t just one of the best true crime movies out there. It’s regarded as a landmark film that brought about the New Hollywood era, a cinematic movement of new filmmakers and styles that began in the 1960s.
8 Easy Rider (1969)
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Easy Rider is so much more than a road trip movie. The 1960s was a time of upheaval in America. There was a lot of tension around the Vietnam War and civil rights, which gave rise to protests, counter culture, and the hippie movement. Drug use and communal lifestyles were rampant during this decade. Easy Rider captures all of that. The film follows two outcasts (Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper), who take their motorcycles on a cross-country trip in search of freedom. Fonda and Hopper even used real drugs during the film. The montage where the two bikers are riding through deserts and open country, as Steppenwolf’s “Born To Be Wild” blares in the background, perfectly sum up this movie, and also the 1960s.
7 Saturday Night Fever (1977)
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Saturday Night Fever captured the 1970s disco scene, a popular social trend that dominated the decade. Flashing lights, dance moves, disco balls — this film had all of it. Saturday Night Fever also explored disco’s subculture, including the extravagant fashion style, drug use, and sexual promiscuity of the era. Even its soundtrack reflected the 1970s, featuring iconic hits from the disco kings themselves, the Bee Gees. Ironically, Saturday Night Fever helped to make the disco scene even more popular. But be warned: this movie hasn’t aged too well. Its disco focus and misogyny could make it a hard watch for some modern viewers.
6 The Breakfast Club (1985)
The 1980s is known for pumping out coming-of-age films that captured teen angst, from comedies like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off to dramas like The Breakfast Club. Many of these films featured the same young stars, like Molly Ringwald, Emilio Estevez, Anthony Michael Hall, and Judd Nelson — all of whom starred in The Breakfast Club. This group came to be known as the Brat Pack, a play on Frank Sinatra’s group the Rat Pack. Many of these coming-of-age films were directed by John Hughes, whose 1980s films have defined a generation.
The Breakfast Club brings together five seemingly different high school students who, over the course of a Saturday detention, learn that they might have more in common than they realized. The film’s soundtrack is also undeniably 80s. “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” was written and recorded for The Breakfast Club and has since become a sort of anthem for this decade.
5 Wall Street (1987)
The 1980s is also characterized by its flourishing economy. Despite a recession in the decade’s early years, the rest of the 80s saw a boost in real estate, jobs, and most noticeably, in the stock market. Wall Street, the New York City hub of America’s stock market, was booming. With this came immense wealth, corporate greed, and morally gray stockbrokers. All of this is captured in Oliver Stone’s cult classic, Wall Street. Set within booming New York City, Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) is an ignorant junior stockbroker who falls under the wing of Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas), an iconic figure in both the film and real-life cinema. “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good,” Gekko tells us. This iconic line, and the film in general, has come to represent the excess that defined the 1980s.
4 Clueless (1995)
If you were a student in the 90s, then you know it was impossible to walk through the halls without hearing one of the famous lines from Clueless. It’s a classic teen comedy starring Alicia Silverstone, as she navigates high school drama and her search for love. Clueless is The Breakfast Club of the 1990s. And like The Breakfast Club, it came to define a generation. It produced iconic lines that every teenage girl was reciting, like “Ugh, as if” or “Whatever!” while shaping their fingers into a W. Clueless highlighted 90s fashion and popularized styles that we saw throughout the decade.
3 The Matrix (1999)
The 1990s saw a huge boost in technological advancement. Cell phones were everywhere, and this little thing called the internet was gaining traction. Even the visual effects in film got a massive upgrade. Just compare 1984’s The Terminator with its 1991 sequel, and you’ll see what we’re talking about. But this increasing dependence on technology also brought fear. Many people were terrified of the year 2000 and were convinced that its arrival would cause computers to crash. Y2K, they called it. The Matrix beautifully captures all of this.
The Matrix shows a dystopian world where humanity went to war with machines — and we lost. Technology has taken over, turning humans into an energy source and the world into a barren wasteland. What we see every day is nothing more than a computer-generated illusion, modeled after the world in 1999. The real date is estimated to be around 2199. Using ground-breaking visual effects, this film created some of the most iconic moments in cinema, like when its protagonist Neo (Keanu Reeves) uses back-breaking moves to dodge his enemy’s bullets. The Matrix defined the turn of the century and made viewers question the nature of their reality. Since its release in 1999, The Matrix has gone down as one of the greatest sci-fi films ever made.
2 X-Men (2000)
You might be wondering how a superhero movie can encapsulate a decade. 2000’s X-Men was the first modern superhero film. It combined an all-star cast and advanced CGI with a realistic, non-campy approach to comic book characters. The result was a massive critical and commercial success. For better or worse, it breathed new life into the superhero genre. 2000s films like Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy, The Fantastic Four movies, and Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight trilogy were all born from 2000’s X-Men. As good as it is, this movie is responsible for ushering in the age of superhero films, reboots, and sequels that have come to dominate cinema. And we’re still seeing the effects of it over 20 years later with the Marvel Cinematic Universe and DC Extended Universe.
1 The Social Network (2010)
Social media websites started gaining momentum during the 2000s. And it all began with Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook. Initially designed for college students, Facebook transformed into something so much bigger. And more scandalous. David Fincher’s masterpiece The Social Network captures the rise of Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) and Facebook.
It’s arguably one of the most important films ever made. It shows how a college student revolutionized our society and turned his little website into a multi-billion dollar company. Its creation brought about social media copycats and changed how we interact and live. As Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) says in the movie, “We lived on farms, then we lived in cities, and now we’re going to live on the internet!” And he’s right. Because of Facebook, we’re now obsessed with social media, posting every picture on Instagram and every thought on Twitter. The Social Network encapsulates this emerging trend, one that we saw throughout the 2010s and are still seeing today.
This story originally appeared on Movieweb
