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The Best Films of the 1970s Decade
The greatest films of the 1970s, from the American New Wave to Europe’s bleak surrealism.
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The Tenant (1976)
Even more disturbing than the realisation that Polish immigrant Trelkovsky is slowly transforming into the previous occupant of his apartment in The Tenant is the creeping feeling that his neighbours may be responsible, as Roman Polanski leads us down an absurd, psychosexual study of the alienation and guilt felt by outsiders in an inhospitable modern…
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Mirror (1975)
Even as the mysteries of the human mind elude us throughout Mirror, Andrei Tarkovsky’s precise control over the raw elements of time and life itself poetically sink us into its surreal depths, opening a portal into nostalgic childhood memories distorted by the dreams, doubts, and desires that have emerged in the decades since.
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Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
The complicated love story behind the bank robbery and police stand-off of Dog Day Afternoon was never going to survive the media sensationalism around it, though Sidney Lumet’s gripping crime narrative offers the two criminals at its centre great sensitivity in its nuanced characterisations, sympathetically studying the pressures and poor decisions that led them to…
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Mean Streets (1973)
Martin Scorsese’s Catholic guilt reverberates strongly through the theological symbolism of his breakthrough gangster film Mean Streets, seeking redemption for one low-level New York mafioso trapped in his own personal purgatory of secular modernity, while cutting him off from the spiritual roots of his faith.
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Duelle (1976)
It wouldn’t be hard to believe that each location in Duelle is interconnected within some giant, labyrinthine complex, entangling its mortal characters in a phantasmagorical web of manipulation set up by two warring goddesses, while Jacques Rivette’s obscure narrative uncovers the intransient magic simmering beneath the most ordinary corners of modern society.
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Autumn Sonata (1978)
Like the persistent rotation between immaculately framed wide shots and close-ups, and the seasonal changes implied within the title Autumn Sonata, both mother and daughter are trapped within cycles of repression in Ingmar Bergman’s psychological family drama, poignantly recognising them as similarly flawed copies of each other.