25 Must-See Movies Turning 50 in 2025

The 1970s are widely regarded as the best decade in cinema history. Newly unburdened by years of censorship and armed with a more permissive R ratings classification, emerging filmmaking talent (Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola) pushed the medium forward, offering new perspectives on psychological thrillers, crime dramas, and action-adventure films. Many were infused with a nihilism unique to the era: Even Hollywood’s most eternal optimist, Steven Spielberg, began the ’70s mired in road rage (1971’s Duel) and the dark side of tourism (1975’s Jaws).

It wouldn’t last. In 1976, Rocky began sanding down the rough edges so prevalent in film, ushering in a new optimism later shared by hits like Star Wars (1977), Superman: The Movie (1978) and Grease (1978). In many ways, 1975 was the last full year movies belonged mostly to adults. Of the 10 highest-grossing films, arguably only one—Peter Sellers pratfalling through a Pink Panther sequel—was palatable to kids.

If you’re curious what this jaded cinematic landscape looked like a half-century ago, here are some of the most acclaimed, contested, and otherwise notable films from that standout year.

1. Barry Lyndon
2. Cooley High
3. The Day of the Locust
4. Deep Red
5. Dog Day Afternoon
6. Dolemite
7. Grey Gardens
8. Hard Times
9. Hester Street
10. Jaws
11. Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
12. The Man Who Would Be King
13. Monty Python and the Holy Grail
14. Nashville
15. Night Moves
16. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
17. Picnic at Hanging Rock
18. The Rocky Horror Picture Show
19. Rollerball
20. Shampoo
21. The Stepford Wives
22. The Story of Adele H.
23. Switchblade Sisters
24. Three Days of the Condor
25. Tommy

Barry Lyndon

Stanley Kubrick’s wiggiest period piece—based on The Luck of Barry Lyndon by William Makepeace Thackeray—charts the rise and fall of a dashing, insolent clout-chaser (Ryan O’Neal) across 18th-century Europe. Its meticulously crafted frames evoke Rococo paintings for a reason: Kubrick and his cinematographer John Alcott studied the work of Jean-Antoine Watteau and his acolytes. Barry Lyndon’s legacy includes four Oscars (costume design, score, cinematography, and art/set decoration) and an equally important fancam set to 21 Savage’s “a lot.”

Cooley High

Best friends Preach and Cochise are on the verge of graduating high school and hoping to break free of the Chicago housing projects that they were raised in. But in Cooley High, director Michael Schultz’s coming-of-age classic, no one is being pitied. Instead, the film depicts Black teens on the edge of adulthood, aware of their circumstances but not condemning them. That approach was a radical departure from depictions of Black life on film at the time and widely cited as an influence on Black filmmakers who followed, from Spike Lee to the late John Singleton.

The Day of the Locust

The Day of the Locust—from John Schlesinger and Waldo Salt, the director-screenwriter pairing behind Midnight Cowboy—is a bleak, seedy, and cynical portrait of 1930s Hollywood that dies screaming in chaos and fire. But so is its source material: Nathanael West’s 1939 novel of the same name. William Atherton as Yale-educated young artist Tod Hackett, the ostensible protagonist, is eclipsed by Donald Sutherland’s ungainly accountant Homer Simpson and Karen Black’s wannabe starlet Faye Greener. (Yes, Homer Simpson of The Simpsons is named after the character, though creator Matt Groening also took inspiration from his father, Homer.)

Deep Red

Dario Argento’s giallo classic follows a British jazz musician (David Hemmings) who witnesses a murder in Rome and races to uncover the truth before the culprit can take him out, too. It’s a bloody I Spy spread of horror’s most treasured motifs—a black-gloved killer, a creepy doll, a haunted house, unresolved childhood trauma—filled with innovative practical set pieces and so much panache that it still feels fresh half a century after its release.

Dog Day Afternoon

“Attica!” Sidney Lumet’s ripped-from-the-headlines docudrama about a bank robber (Al Pacino) and his accomplice (John Cazale) in a police standoff sounds like a crime cliché. But Pacino’s motives are more complex than simple greed: He wants to help pay for the sex-change operation of his partner (Chris Sarandon). As the film steers toward inevitable tragedy, Pacino—wide-eyed, sweaty, invested—proves yet again why he might have been the single best actor of the decade. (Pacino initially turned the role down: Lumet then approached Dustin Hoffman before circling back to his first choice.)

Dolemite

Rudy Ray Moore’s independent film about a pimp deputized by the government to go after drug dealers is about as tactless as you’d expect. It’s poorly conceived, acted, and filmed, including visible boom mics in some shots. But what it does have is Moore’s enthusiasm to be a star. A failing stand-up comic, Moore decided to give himself a break by financing and cowriting a feature about his stage alter ego. While no classic, it was proof of concept that Black filmmakers could thrive outside of the mainstream Hollywood studio system. Eddie Murphy later portrayed Moore in Dolemite Is My Name (2019).

Grey Gardens

Documentarians Albert and David Maysles present the Ediths Beale—“Big Edie” and her daughter, “Little Edie,” Jackie Kennedy’s aunt and cousin—as a couple of guileless recluses frozen in the past and blithely unaffected by the current squalor of their East Hampton mansion in Grey Gardens. The showcase of wasted potential and a joint break from reality has become a kind of fable of American aristocracy gone wrong, and other creators have examined how it happened in their own fictionalized adaptations—most notably a 2006 Broadway musical and Michael Sucsy’s 2009 HBO film starring Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore.

Hard Times

Charles Bronson has always been about economy: The actor rarely expended energy on one more word of dialogue or facial twitch than was deemed necessary. In Hard Times, he found a director—Walter Hill—who could match his conservative output. Bronson plays Chaney, a bare-knuckle boxer who survives the Great Depression by taking illegal fights. While Hard Times has all the requisite fight movie cliches—shady promoters, betting, turncoat supporters—it’s all elevated by Bronson, who snapped off a few jabs and hooks before the fight movie genre turned increasingly sentimental (Rocky) and garish (Rocky II). Chaney was more Rambo: He speaks fewer than 500 words throughout the entire film.

Hester Street

In an era when immigrant stories were rarely being told earnestly and women weren’t often given an opportunity to direct, Hester Street broke down some doors. Based on the 1896 novella Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto, Joan Micklin Silver’s film details the life of Jewish immigrants who come to Manhattan in the late 19th century. Yankel (Steven Keats) finds his footing in the new world, but wife Gitl (Carol Kane) struggles, both with his infidelity and the clash of cultures. Silver shot it in black and white in just 34 days. The film was a critical success and earned Kane an Oscar nomination.

Jaws

It’s hard to say anything about Steven Spielberg’s seminal creature feature that hasn’t already been said a million times. It’s based on a book by Peter Benchley. It invented the modern blockbuster. The shoot was overlong and over-budget. Roy Scheider improvised “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.” The brilliant choice to scarcely show the shark—keeping your heart rate high from beginning to end—was actually just made because the mechanical shark barely ever functioned. The film’s pervasiveness in pop culture could give you the impression that it’s overrated. The only cure for that is to watch it … again.

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman chronicles three days in the life of a widowed mother (Delphine Seyrig) as she cooks, cleans, runs errands, babysits, chats with her son, and sleeps with men for money—all conducted with the same formulaic, quotidian remove. The film’s excruciating mundanity, which plays out in lengthy, static takes over nearly three and a half mostly silent hours, invites two viewing experiences. You could zone out (and, these days, stare at your phone), in which case you’ll miss the signs of Jeanne’s slow unraveling and maybe also hate the movie; or you could lean in, heightening your sensitivity to Jeanne’s smallest shifts in action and attitude, in which case her final shocking deed won’t seem unjustifiable at all. Enough critics choose the latter tack that Jeanne Dielman topped Sight and Sound’s 2022 list of greatest films, making Akerman the first female director to earn that honor.

The Man Who Would Be King

Just four years after his last regular outing as James Bond (though he’d return to the role in 1983), Sean Connery costarred with Michael Caine in this muscular John Huston epic about two rudderless British soldiers who find success as con artists in the country of Kafiristan. Huston based the film on a Rudyard Kipling novella: His script, cowritten with Gladys Hill, garnered an Academy Award nomination—one of four the film received. (It was Connery’s second grand adventure of the year: He also made The Wind and the Lion, based on the true story of Teddy Roosevelt’s liberation of a Greek American hostage in Morocco.)

Monty Python and the Holy Grail

British comedy troupe Monty Python’s absurdist spin on Arthurian legend is light on Arthurian legend and heavy on flesh wounds, a Trojan Rabbit, a guy once turned into a newt (he got better), knights who say “Ni!”, and coconut halves knocked together to simulate trotting horses (because the filmmakers couldn’t afford real horses). But you probably already knew all that, because the movie’s best gags have taken up residence in our collective consciousness right alongside the Jaws theme song.

Nashville

Robert Altman’s Americana epic illustrates through a couple dozen disparate characters in Nashville—from Shelley Duvall’s opportunistic groupie to Henry Gibson’s power-hungry country star—that we’re all united by dreams and disillusionment (or, writ large, music and politics). The director’s commitment to authenticity went beyond the overlapping dialogue so common in his work: He also enlisted the actors to riff off Joan Tewkesbury’s script throughout production. Ronee Blakley wrote her character Barbara Jean’s entire on-stage breakdown the night before filming it.

Night Moves

In Night Moves, Los Angeles private detective Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman), affably perplexed by his own personal and professional impotence, tracks a runaway teenager (Melanie Griffith) to the Florida Keys and gets tangled in a much thornier mystery while there. It’s a contemplative character study with a neo-noir framework whose underexplained story beats are sort of the point. “We didn’t pay much attention to the plot,” director Arthur Penn once said. “There was never going to be a way of saying ‘Ah-ha!’ in the last reel when you find out that so-and-so did so-and-so. And my only excuse or explanation for that is that we’re part of a generation which knows there are no solutions.”

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

All Randle McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) wants is to do his time at a mental institution after manipulating the court system to get out of a prison stint. All Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher) wants to do is maintain control of the building after the rebellious McMurphy begins riling up patients. Their battle of wills makes up the heart of Cuckoo’s Nest, adapted from the 1962 Ken Kesey novel of the same name. It was another indelible performance by Nicholson, and the film itself was generously rewarded: It won all five major Oscars including Best Picture, a feat that hadn’t happened since It Happened One Night back in 1934.

Picnic at Hanging Rock

Picnic at Hanging Rock, based on a novel by Joan Lindsay, centers on the disappearance of a few schoolgirls during an outing to Hanging Rock—a real-life labyrinth of craggy peaks in Victoria, Australia—in 1900. But it’s less an investigation of that tragedy than of teenage girlhood itself, a cocktail of latent eroticism and violence inflicted both by and upon its subjects. The film’s impressionistic style, which director Peter Weir achieved by stretching wedding veils over camera lenses, makes the whole viewing experience feel like a memory of your own.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show

Trade your musty old mad scientist for Tim Curry’s flashy and fabulous Dr. Frank N. Furter; swap out your grunting and green-tinged monster man for a blond Adonis in a golden banana hammock; toss in a Peter Pan–collared Susan Sarandon edging toward a sexual awakening ... and you’ve got yourself cinema’s best orgasmusical, a genre we just made up. The Rocky Horror Picture Show rebounded after a dark and stormy box office performance to become one of the most beloved midnight movies of all time; it’s also brimming with nods to the horror classics that came before it.

Rollerball

Jonathan E. (James Caan) is the Tom Brady of Rollerball, a vicious game celebrated in 2018 America that blends football with roller derby. But Jonathan is also growing too popular for an oppressive corporate structure to tolerate, pitting the populist hero against an authoritarian regime bent on denying individualism at any cost. Though the film was meant to be an indictment of spectator violence, director Norman Jewison soon learned that some Texas investors wanted to mount a real Rollerball league. After subsequent decades have shown the devastating neurological effects of combat sports like football, Rollerball seems more prescient now than ever before.

Shampoo

Warren Beatty had an enduring reputation as Hollywood’s most prolific playboy. True or not, he used that profile to great effect in Shampoo, a smart comedy from Hal Ashby about a Beverly Hills hairdresser (Beatty) finding less and less success and satisfaction in his rampant womanizing. In a post-Watergate climate, the film finds parallels in politics and bed-hopping, arguing that lying in bed and lying in office can often amount to the same thing.

The Stepford Wives

Call it a prelude to the tradwife trend: William Goldman adapted the 1972 Ira Levin novel about a peculiar Connecticut suburb in which most of the wives seem unreasonably subservient to their husbands. While the film serves as a psychological thriller, it’s even more adept at satirizing the kind of middle-class utopia promised by lifestyle magazines and detergent commercials. But not everyone got the message of the parody: The film attracted protesters angry at its depiction of women. Director Bryan Forbes was even attacked by a feminist viewer with an umbrella.

The Story of Adele H.

In the 1860s, Victor Hugo’s youngest daughter, Àdele Hugo, absconded to Halifax, Nova Scotia, to be with a British soldier she had fallen for while living in the Channel Islands. The soldier, Albert Pinson, spurned her in Halifax, and Àdele’s love metastasized into obsession—a manifestation of a mental illness thought to be schizophrenia. Isabelle Adjani gained global acclaim and an Oscar nomination for bringing the ill-fated figure back to life in François Truffaut’s The Story of Adele H, a marked change in perspective for a director whose female characters are usually worshiped by their male counterparts. Not that it stopped Truffaut from glorifying (or objectifying) her with his camera; the film teems with close-ups highlighting Adjani’s beauty even as her character deteriorates.

Switchblade Sisters

The 1970s produced several urban gang pictures, like The Warriors (1979) and The Wanderers (1979). But none spun the genre on its head quite like Switchblade Sisters, which puts its focus on an all-girl gang (the Dagger Debs) and their leader, Lace, as they deal with everything from reform school to a knife battle at a roller rink. Somehow, a tank shows up. Reflecting on the film two decades after its release, New York Times film critic Stephen Holden dubbed the cast “Valley Girls imitating Humphrey Bogart.” It’s a grindhouse feature through and through, one emblematic of a decade more concerned with hedonistic titillation than any kind of tact. No wonder exploitation enthusiast Quentin Tarantino helped give the movie a new lease on life in the ’90s. 

Three Days of the Condor

At the center of this propulsive political thriller is Robert Redford’s Joe Turner, an erudite CIA operative who trawls novels and other published works to identify plots well-suited to espionage in the real world. A baffling slaughter lands him in the deep end of a conspiracy that tests his trust in America’s systems and his own integrity, bringing Faye Dunaway’s hostage-turned-accomplice Kathy Hale along for the ride. The film is a premier example of post-Watergate disillusionment and paranoia. However, director Sydney Pollack disputed the widespread assumption that it was meant as a critique of the CIA’s broad and opaque powers.

Tommy

The Who’s 1969 rock opera is given the theatrical treatment through the lens of the eternally strange Ken Russell: Russell cast lead singer Roger Daltry as the title character, a Helen Keller–esque prodigy who somehow excels at pinball and winds up being looked upon with messianic potential. Each psychedelic scene leads into an even more frenzied one, including an appearance by a lip-synching Jack Nicholson. Few movies that year would be as delirious, though Lisztomania—a film about composer Franz Liszt that also stars Daltrey with Russell behind the camera—comes close.

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