When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences looked back at 1975, it gave its Best Picture award to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. That made it only as far as #4 on my list, but there's no shame in that—there's a movie in the honorable mentions this time that would've made the top five in a less stellar year.
1. Nashville
Directed by Robert Altman
Written by Joan Tewkesbury
Some of my friends dismiss Nashville as a smug left-coaster giving a raspberry to flyover country. To them I point out that the least sympathetic characters in the whole vast cast are the British reporter and the L.A. rocker. Altman's scorn is nothing if not universal.
2. Seven Beauties
Written and directed by Lina Wertmuller
A pitch-dark comedy about sex, fascism, domination, submission, cruelty, conformity, and machismo.
3. Welfare
Written and directed by Frederic Wiseman
The great epic of American bureaucracy.
4. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Directed by Miloš Forman
Written by Bo Goldman and Lawrence Hauben, from a novel by Ken Kesey
People call this a countercultural movie, but that could mean more than one thing. The counterculture had its McMurphys, and it turned out to have some budding Nurse Ratcheds too.
5. Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Directed by Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones
Written by Gilliam, Jones, Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, and Michael Palin
Years of inept quotation by teenage geeks affecting bad English accents can't smother the comic genius of this movie.
6. Love and Death
Written and directed by Woody Allen
"Boris, you're a coward!" "Yes, but I'm a militant coward."
7. Dog Day Afternoon
Directed by Sidney Lumet
Written by Frank Pierson
Best bank-robbery movie ever.
8. Night Moves
Directed by Arthur Penn
Written by Alan Sharp
"Do you ask these questions because you want to know the answer or is it just something you think a detective should do?"
9. Picnic at Hanging Rock
Directed by Peter Weir
Written by Cliff Green, from a novel by Joan Lindsay
Even when nothing seems to be happening, there's a pulsating dread. Like a horror movie where the horror is always just offscreen.
10. Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer
Directed by Thom Andersen
The prehistory of the movies.
Honorable mentions:
11. Jaws (Steven Spielberg)
12. Fox and His Friends (Rainer Werner Fassbinder)
13. Grey Gardens (Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Ellen Hovde, Muffie Meyer)
14. Organism (Hilary Harris)
15. The Man Who Would Be King (John Huston)
16. Shivers (David Cronenberg)
17. Posse (Kirk Douglas)
18. Monsieur Pointu (André Leduc, Bernard Longpré)
19. Three Days of the Condor (Sydney Pollack)
20. The Magic Flute (Ingmar Bergman)
How good a year for movies was 1975? That top 10 list features the best Wiseman film I've seen, the best Forman film I've seen, the best Gilliam (as director, at least), the best Allen, the best Lumet, the best Penn, and the best Weir. And down in the honorable mentions, the best Spielberg and Pollack are lurking about.
Of the films of 1975 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in Gangsters.
