Ten 1970s films singled out as having aged well

Collider has compiled a list of ten lesser-known 1970s films that its writer says have aged remarkably well.

The selections range from William Friedkin’s Sorcerer — a grim, existential remake of The Wages of Fear about four men transporting volatile explosives — to Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, a Venice-set meditation on grief starring Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie. The list also highlights adventure and moral critique in The Man Who Would Be King (Sean Connery, Michael Caine); Hal Ashby’s road-movie bitterness in The Last Detail (Jack Nicholson, Otis Young); Jack Nicholson’s portrait of alienation in Five Easy Pieces; Alan J. Pakula’s paranoia thriller The Parallax View; the procedural tension of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three; Peter Weir’s dreamlike The Last Wave; Peter Yates’s unglamorous crime study The Friends of Eddie Coyle; and Terrence Malick’s visually rich Days of Heaven.

The article notes varied reasons these films endure — from Roeg’s fractured editing and Malick’s Oscar-winning cinematography to the influence some works have had on later filmmakers — and calls them worth checking out. It also records concrete details for Sorcerer, including its June 24, 1977 release, 121-minute runtime, and credits (director William Friedkin; writers William Friedkin, Georges Arnaud, Walon Green) and notes that Sorcerer was a box office bomb despite later critical appreciation.

Key Topics

Culture, Sorcerer, William Friedkin, Don't Look Now, Nicolas Roeg, Terrence Malick