100 Best Movies of 1975 Ranked (One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest)
The latest: Jack Nicholson and Louise Fletcher went toe-to-toe, winning oscars for their rich adversarial performances in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary!
1975 was a landmark year for the movie biz, with Jaws (directed by a 27-year-old Steven Spielberg) creating the summer blockbuster as we know it, where audiences lined up around the block to escape the heat and pick up some aquaphobia along the way.
As you’ll witness in our guide to the 100 best movies of 1975, Jaws was that rare beast that not only made all the money (it was the highest-grossing movie ever, beating 1972’s The Godfather, and to be bested by Star Wars in 1977), but also had critics putting up gone-fishin’ signs, while scooping up Academy Award nominations.
The list of 100 movies begin with Certified Fresh films, all of which were nominated for what might be the strongest Best Picture Oscar class ever. There’s Jaws, acting powerhouse showcase (and ultimate winner) One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Robert Altman’s wandering music opus Nashville, Stanley Kubrick cult fave Barry Lyndon, and progressive drama Dog Day Afternoon.
More 1975 Certified Fresh movies include major international pictures like spooky Australian New Waver Picnic at Hanging Rock, Michelangelo Antonioni The Passenger, and Chantal Akerman’s epic slice-of-life Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Paranoid thrillers defined the decade, and ’75 got one of the most prominent ones with Three Days of the Condor, with Robert Redford taking the most ill-timed lunch break ever. And any sour seventies mood was lightened with comedies, from mainstream (Shampoo) to subversive (Monty Python and the Holy Grail) to camp transgressive (The Rocky Horror Picture Show).
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As you’ve seen, after the Certified Fresh films are movies rated Fresh on the Tomatometer. It’s no shortage of classics that haven’t reached the critics-review threshold for Certified Fresh status, including Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror, giallo centerpiece Deep Red, landmark eccentric documentary Grey Gardens, and sci-fi cult comedy A Boy and His Dog.
Rotten 1975 movies round out the list. Some of the ones that have endured with positive Popcornmeters are True Grit sequel Rooster Cogburn with John Wayne back in the saddle, Terror of Mechagodzilla (closing out Godzilla‘s Showa era), and exploitation icons Dolemite and Switchblade Sisters.
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