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: 2.5★
If you've seen Ari Aster's Midsommar, you've already met the ghost of Picnic at Hanging Rock, whether you realised it or not. Peter Weir's 1975 film, one of the most revered things Australian cinema has produced, is the clear ancestor of that
Rating: 3.0★
To most horror fans, the name Lucio Fulci means one thing: gore, and buckets of it. The splatter operas of his later career earned him the "Godfather of Gore" billing that still defines his reputation, and if you want to see what that looks like in full swing,
Rating: 1.0★
A film named after a theorem in set theory ought, you would think, to have something clever up its sleeve. It ought to justify that title with ideas that crackle, that reward patience, that make the brain do something interesting. Zorns Lemma, Hollis Frampton's 1970 structuralist experiment, does
Rating: 3.5★
When I was sweating through my GCSEs, our school sent us off with an unusual piece of revision advice: go and watch Quadrophenia. Decades on, my daughter now sits in the same classrooms, and the same recommendation is still doing the rounds. There is something perfect about that continuity, because
Rating: 3.5★
There's a scene early in Top of the Heap that sets out exactly what kind of film you're in for. George Lattimer, a Black police officer in early-seventies America, is caught between two worlds and welcome in neither. His colleagues on the force make his
Rating: 3.0★
Ten films deep into a director's back catalogue and you start to think you know what you're getting. With George A. Romero, I thought I had a reasonable handle on it: sharp social commentary wrapped in viscera, monsters as metaphor, chaos as critique. Then I sat
Rating: 3.5★
Sometimes you don't need much of an excuse to queue something up. I came to Dario Argento's 1970 directorial debut for two reasons: Argento himself, and Ennio Morricone. And honestly, Morricone was the more pressing of the two. I genuinely consider him the finest composer in
Rating: 3.5★
I've heard the names Asterix and Obelix my entire life. They are an unavoidable pillar of European pop culture, even if their footprint has shrunk a bit here in the UK in recent years. Endless merchandise, cultural osmosis, playground references. Yet, somehow, René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo'
Rating: 4.0★
"Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?" Honestly, yeah. I just watched what is arguably one of the greatest cop films ever put to celluloid, and I came out the other side buzzing. That line has been quoted, parodied and imitated so many times over the decades
Rating: 3.0★
There's a certain kind of film that dares you to keep watching, and Glauber Rocha's The Lion Has Seven Heads is very much one of them. It's a baffling, swirling beast of a picture, and I mean that in the most genuinely ambivalent way
Rating: 1.5★
Let me be straight with you before anything else: if you are thinking about sitting down with Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, you deserve to know what you are actually getting into. Because the way this film tends to be packaged and sold, as a whimsical, avant-garde surrealist
Rating: 3.5★
There is a haunting beauty to the American Midwest that few filmmakers have ever captured quite like Terrence Malick. His 1973 debut, Badlands, is one of those films you feel as much as you watch. It drifts over you like heat rising off a sun-baked road, gorgeous and unsettling
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