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★
Meir Zarchi's 1978 exploitation picture made me feel genuinely, physically ill. Not in the way a properly crafted horror film leaves you shaken and unsettled, but in the way you feel after accidentally stepping in something vile on a dark pavement. I've sat through some bleak,
Rating: 3.5★
Brian De Palma had me from the very beginning. Not the beginning of his career, mind you, but the beginning of Sisters, a 1972 film I came to surprisingly late and with surprisingly little foreknowledge. The opening scenes hook you with a deceptively simple premise and then tighten the grip,
Rating: 2.5★
There's a particular kind of unease that settles in when you're watching a British-produced documentary from 1978 attempt to reckon with the brutal machinery of British colonialism. That unease never fully leaves you during Rupert Roonaraine's The Terror and the Time, and honestly,
Rating: 1.5★
There's a version of The Seasons that I could imagine loving. Shepherds in the Armenian highlands, a brutal and beautiful landscape, Vivaldi's Four Seasons rolling underneath it all. On paper, that's genuinely poetic. In practice, I sat there waiting for something to happen, and
Rating: 3.0★
There's a distinct, sun-drenched charm to the 16mm aesthetic of 1970s cinema, and Pim de la Parra's 1976 drama One People captures that era's visual texture about as well as anything I've seen from the period. I have a real soft
Rating: 3.0★
There's a particular pleasure in tracking a cultural phenomenon back to its source, and Moonrunners is exactly that kind of discovery. Gy Waldron's 1975 film is the undisputed progenitor of The Dukes of Hazzard, and the DNA is all over it: moonshine runs, dusty Southern backroads,
Rating: 2.0★
There's something genuinely exciting about a film tournament format that forces you to watch cinema from corners of the world you'd never normally visit. My "Movie World Cup" has already thrown up some wonderful surprises, but it also drops you in front of films
Rating: 2.0★
The trailer sold me a lie. A tight, claustrophobic sci-fi thriller, bodies turning against their owners, paranoia spreading floor by floor through a sealed apartment block. Something in the vein of The Crazies, maybe, or Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I sat down fully braced for that film. What
Rating: 3.5★
There's a genuine audacity to what Moustapha Akkad attempts here, and for the most part, he pulls it off. The Message sets itself one of the most extraordinary creative challenges in the history of historical epic filmmaking: tell the story of the birth of Islam, with the Prophet
Rating: 3.0★
There's a particular kind of comfort that very few films can offer, and The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh is one of them. Sitting down to revisit it, you're not bracing yourself for plot twists or emotional gut-punches. You're settling in. You&
Rating: 3.5★
Some films hit you like a fist. Soleil O is one of them. Med Hondo's 1970 debut feature follows an educated man from Mauritania who arrives in Paris with every reason to believe in the promise of the colonial "motherland," only to find door after door
Rating: 4.5★
Some films you watch for yourself. Some films you watch with your kids, and you end up rediscovering something you didn't even know you'd lost. Sitting down with the little ones to watch James Frawley's The Muppet Movie, I wasn't expecting to
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