A great action film for every year

By the 1980s, everybody knew what an action movie was. They had their own section in the video shop. And on the video box or the poster, there were star names written in a font nearly as big as the title’s. What kind of movies did Arnold Schwarzenegger make? Action movies. How about Sylvester Stallone or Jackie Chan or Jean-Claude Van Damme? Also action movies.

Names like these promised the visceral, bicep-heavy, high-octane thrills we’ve come to expect from the genre: the breathless stunts, explosions, kinetic combat and wanton destruction. But exactly when we came to call these simply ‘action movies’ is more difficult to trace. Certainly, moving pictures craved action from the beginning. It’s there in the cue “Lights, camera… action” and seems to have been carved into the new medium’s constitution – its way of defining itself as different from books or theatre….