Smokey and the Bandit (1977)
A huge success at the time of its release (only Star Wars made more money in 1977), Smokey and the Bandit was the right movie at the right time, riding the wave of Burt Reynolds’ popularity, rascally...
Category: 1970s
Death Wish (1974)
Death Wish succeeds more as an anti-liberal backlash than as a movie, with an engaging premise of a conscientious objector who takes up arms in the streets of New York City when he finds that...
Annie Hall (1977)
A romantic comedy like no other before it, Annie Hall proves to be a tour-de-force and landmark film for Woody Allen as a writer, director, and star. It’s the film that showed Allen, and the world,...
Silver Streak (1976)
Silver Streak is the first of two Colin Higgins scripts to emulate the lighter side of Hitchcock (Foul Play is the other), and even though no one would ever confuse the quality of this film with...
The Candidate (1972)
Although decades old, The Candidate still feels more resonant now as the year it was released. In fact, it’s a satire so spot-on that it’s often hard to distinguish when screenwriter Jeremy Larner’s script is...
Halloween (1978)
Although Black Christmas predates John Carpenter’s film by four years, Halloween is the one that popularized the formula for almost every slasher movie that followed it, from Friday the 13th to A Nightmare on Elm Street to I Know What You Did Last...
Foul Play (1978)
Foul Play marks the second of two Colin Higgins screenplays to liberally lift plots straight from the works of Alfred Hitchcock, then wrap it up in 70s comic style, Silver Streak being the other. Call this The 39...
Phantom of the Paradise (1974)
Kind of an oddity in the De Palma oeuvre, as it’s far different from anything he had done before or since. A Rock Opera, as the saying goes, not too far removed from the crazy...
Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)
Star Trek: The Motion Picture continues the TV series that ran on NBC from 1966-69. Suffering abysmal ratings in its initial run, Paramount sold the show to syndication, where it developed a strongly devoted...
Manhattan (1979)
There may forever be arguments as to which film is Woody Allen’s best, with Annie Hall perhaps gaining the most attention. However, if the question were regarding which film most exemplified Woody Allen as a great...