The 1970s gave Hollywood its first genuine auteur era, with directors handed creative control and audiences handed films like The Godfather and Taxi Driver in return. It was a decade of paranoia, ambiguity, and moral unease on screen, bookended by the blockbuster boom that Star Wars helped ignite. See what Macca made of it all below.
Rating: 3.0★
There are films that arrive carrying the full weight of critical consensus behind them, and Annie Hall is one of the heaviest. Released in 1977 by United Artists, through the production banner of Jack Rollins and Charles H. Joffe, it took the Best Picture Oscar that year and remains the
Rating: 4.0★
There are films that arrive as provocations and spend fifty years becoming more relevant, not less. Sidney Lumet's Network, released in 1976 by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, is one of them. The premise is simple enough on paper: Howard Beale, a veteran news anchor facing forced retirement, announces on
Rating: 3.5★
Released in the summer of 1972, Snoopy, Come Home arrived as the second theatrical feature spun out of Charles M. Schulz's beloved Peanuts comic strip, following three years after the franchise's big-screen debut. By this point, Schulz's characters had already conquered television, newspaper
Rating: 3.5★
When Rocky arrived in 1976, it was one of those films that seemed to come from nowhere and land everywhere. Made on a budget that barely registered by Hollywood standards, written by and starring a virtually unknown Sylvester Stallone, it won three Academy Awards including Best Picture and turned its
Country Hungary
Hey, You is a feast for the eyes. Péter Szoboszlay's Hungarian short is one of those pieces where you could pause on almost any frame and happily hang it on the wall, and while it is not fine-art realism, for its time and its means it is
Country Poland
If You Want Peace, Prepare for War is a genuinely lovely piece of craft that runs out of things to say almost before it has begun. Zofia Oraczewska's short is a delicate, distinctive bit of work, closer to paper art than animation in the traditional sense, and it
Country Czech Republic
Every so often you watch something and simply marvel at the craft of it, and Jan Švankmajer's Jabberwocky is exactly that. This is the third or fourth of the great Czech surrealist's stop-motion pieces I have seen, and it is comfortably the most accomplished. In
Rating: 3.5★
Clint Eastwood does not ease you into The Outlaw Josey Wales. It opens with an act of violence so sudden and ugly that you feel it before you've had a chance to brace yourself, and that readiness to start on a gut-punch and make you live in
Rating: 3.5★
The Last Detail hangs on a small, quietly infuriating injustice. A young sailor, barely more than a boy, has been handed eight years in a naval prison for stealing forty dollars from a charity box. Two hardened Navy men are tasked with delivering him there: Nicholson's foul-mouthed
Country United States Of America
The American Dream isn't dead. It just reanimated, shuffled through the automatic doors, and made itself at home in the nearest shopping mall. That image, a horde of the undead mindlessly drifting between shop fronts, escalators, and fountain displays, is so perfectly, savagely funny that it almost hurts.
Rating: 3.0★
Before Shaft is anything else, it is that theme. Isaac Hayes's wah-wah-drenched, Oscar-winning title track, playing over John Shaft striding through the streets of early-seventies New York, is one of the great movie openings in the history of cinema, so effortlessly cool that the
Rating: 3.5★
My wife suggested we watch Deliverance, partly on the strength of our shared soft spot for Burt Reynolds, and partly because it sits on a couple of the "greatest ever" lists I'm slowly working through. I was happy to oblige. The only snag was that I&
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