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: 1.0★
There are films that challenge comfortable viewing habits, and then there are films that treat the act of watching as something closer to an endurance test. Zorns Lemma, released in 1970 and running to a brisk but demanding sixty minutes, belongs very much to the second category, at least if
Rating: 3.5★
There are films that arrive as entertainment and quietly become documents. Quadrophenia, released in 1979 and directed by Franc Roddam, is one of those. Set against the mods-and-rockers clashes of Brighton in 1964, it follows Jimmy, a young London working-class teenager who spends his weekdays enduring a
Rating: 3.5★
Nineteen seventy-two was a remarkable year for independent American cinema, and nowhere was that more visible than in the cycle of Black-led films that had begun to find distribution outside the traditional studio system. Blaxploitation was at its commercial peak, with studios eager to profit from a new
Rating: 3.0★
George A. Romero is a name almost everyone associates with the undead, and understandably so. Night of the Living Dead (1968) rewired the horror genre almost overnight, and the films that followed it, including The Crazies and the long-running Dead series (see our reviews of Day of the Dead
Rating: 3.5★
Few directorial debuts carry quite the same weight of genre history as The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. Released in 1970, the film arrived at a moment when Italian popular cinema was churning out Spaghetti Westerns and crime thrillers at a furious pace, but Dario Argento's first feature
Rating: 3.5★
There are animated films that arrive, do their job, and are more or less forgotten within a generation. Then there are the ones that come embedded in a culture so thoroughly that even people who have never sat down and actually watched them feel they already know them. The Twelve
Rating: 4.0★
By 1971, San Francisco had already become one of the defining backdrops of late-1960s American anxiety: the Summer of Love had curdled, the Zodiac Killer had terrorised the Bay Area in very recent memory, and public trust in institutions was fraying at the edges. Into that climate arrived Dirty
Rating: 3.0★
Glauber Rocha is one of those directors whose reputation in film studies circles far outstrips his name recognition among general audiences, and The Lion Has Seven Heads (original title: Der Leone Have Sept Cabeças, a title that itself announces the film's polyglot, deliberately fractured identity) is a reasonable
Rating: 1.5★
Czech cinema had a remarkable and tragically brief flowering in the 1960s and early 1970s. The movement now known as the Czechoslovak New Wave produced a string of films that pushed hard against the constraints of state-sanctioned socialist realism, using allegory, surrealism, and a loose, improvisatory energy to say
Rating: 3.5★
Before Terrence Malick became synonymous with whispered voiceover and golden-hour cinematography stretched across two-and-a-half hours, he made Badlands: a lean, sun-scorched debut that announced, with some confidence, that a genuinely unusual filmmaking voice had arrived. The film draws its bones from the real-life murder
Rating: 1.0★
Few films from the late 1970s American exploitation circuit carry quite the same poisonous reputation as I Spit on Your Grave. Released in 1978 under the original title Day of the Woman, a name its director would later insist better reflected his intentions, the film arrived at a moment when
Rating: 3.5★
Brian De Palma's career is one of the more fascinating long games in American cinema. He spent the late 1960s making low-budget, countercultural oddities before pivoting, almost instinctively, towards the kind of suspense-driven genre work that would come to define him. Sisters, released in 1972, sits
Film images and data courtesy of TMDB. This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.
The best new reviews, a buried gem with where to watch it, and where the every-country challenge is up to. Free, no spam.
Subscribe free