#21 — One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Milos Forman, 1975) I think it was an episode of one of Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert’s various program derivations that I was watching in which one of the highly influential Chicago film … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 70s — Number Twenty-One
#22 — Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett, 1977) Technically, I suppose, Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep could have also factored into my Top Fifty Films of the 00s list. In fact, that may be the more accurate placement for it … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 70s — Number Twenty-Two
#23 — M*A*S*H (Robert Altman, 1970) Whenever I look at Robert Altman’s breakthrough 1970 film set during the Korean War, I find it simultaneously completely logical and utterly incomprehensible that it spawned a beloved television series that ran for 251 episodes … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 70s — Number Twenty-Three
#24 — Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Werner Herzog, 1972) I will readily concede that it didn’t necessarily take a brilliant director to capture the crazy glint in Klaus Kinski’s eye–a nearsighted drunkard wielding a Polaroid with a scratched up … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 70s — Number Twenty-Four
#25 — Interiors (Woody Allen, 1978) Interiors was Woody Allen’s eighth film as a director. That’s both an impressive amount of features to have churned out in his first twelve years as a filmmaker (Paul Thomas Anderson’s sixth in sixteen … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 70s — Number Twenty-Five
#26 — Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg, 1977) In 1990, film critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert took a break from flinging their thumbs around in judgment and created a television special called The Future of the … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 70s — Number Twenty-Six
#27 — Nashville (Robert Altman, 1975) What does it say about the difference between European cinema, I wonder, that there’s such a pronounced fundamental difference between the two directors, roughly contemporaries, from each respective region that are best suited to having … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 70s — Number Twenty-Seven
#28 — Cries and Whispers (Ingmar Bergman, 1972) As always, I come to Ingmar Bergman as a wary traveler, an interloper into a cinematic world of abstract artistry that I’m not quite confident I’ll ever fully grasp. The legendary Swedish director, as much as anyone who ever stood on a movie set and told the cameraman where to point his machinery, comes at his films with a devotion to mood, deeply developed emotional truth and finding the profundity in that which is withheld. There are mysteries between the lines of his visual poetry and that is where the meaning lies. … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 70s — Number Twenty-Eight
#29 — Young Frankenstein (Mel Brooks, 1974) Like a lot of people who devote way too much mental energy to considering the best and worst of cinema, I have a distinct and enduring admiration for those filmmakers who artfully explore … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 70s — Number Twenty-Nine
#30 — The Last Waltz (Martin Scorsese, 1978) I have a strong memory from when I was a kid, and by kid, I mean an age that I could accurate convey using nothing more than the fingers of my two … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 70s — Number Thirty
Coffee for Two 