10 Movies From 1982 That Are Now Considered Classics

1982 was a fertile year for cinema, yielding crowd-pleasers, uncompromising art films, prestige dramas and rule-breaking genre pictures. Some of these movies were misunderstood on release and reclaimed later, while others arrived as immediate successes whose reputations have only strengthened.

More than forty years on, the best of them continue to shape conversations about genre, spectacle and what film can express. Arnold Schwarzenegger stars in Conan the Barbarian as a warrior driven by revenge after his village is destroyed by a cult led by Thulsa Doom (James Earl Jones).

The plot is deliberately sparse—minimal dialogue, lots of action and striking imagery that nods to Frank Frazetta’s illustrations—and the film helped push fantasy filmmaking forward while launching Schwarzenegger as a star. Gandhi won that year’s Best Picture Oscar, anchored by Ben Kingsley’s immersive performance as the leader of nonviolent resistance.

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