Films That Couldn’t Be Made Today
And whether that’s Hollywood’s loss – or cinema’s gain
People use the phrase “couldn’t be made today” so loosely it’s become almost meaningless, a nostalgic complaint dressed as film criticism, applied equally to films that were real artistic achievements and films that were simply permitted to be harmful in ways we have since recognized. This article makes the distinction explicitly, because the distinction matters.
Each entry carries a verdict. Hollywood’s Loss (the film couldn’t be made today for reasons that reflect poorly on the industry’s current risk tolerance), Cinema’s Gain (the film couldn’t be made today for reasons that reflect real social progress), or Complicated (the answer depends on which element of the film you’re talking about).
The answer is rarely simple. Several films on this list are both a loss and a gain. The verdict reflects the dominant quality of the film’s specific impossibility.
The phrase “couldn’t be made today” tires me. Half the time it’s nostalgia for cruelty dressed up as courage, and the other half it’s a fair grievance about studios that won’t fund anything difficult. Those two complaints deserve to be pulled apart. Some of these films break my heart for what we’ve lost, a couple of them we’re right to have left behind, and I want you to be able to tell which is which.
1. Midnight Cowboy (1969)
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“I’m walking here!”
The only X-rated film to win Best Picture, and it received that rating not for explicit content but because the MPAA had no structure for a film this honest about male prostitution, poverty, and the reality of street survival in late-1960s New York. A contemporary studio wouldn’t greenlight a film with these protagonists (a would-be hustler and a dying con man) at this level of unflinching specificity.
The film would be pitched as a comedy, or a redemption story, or given a third act in which someone finds help. It wouldn’t be allowed to end on a bus to Miami with Ratso dying in the seat next to Joe.
The honesty that makes Midnight Cowboy irreplaceable is the honesty about what these men’s options are. Not what they could be, with the right choices, or the right help. What they are. The film doesn’t offer the audience the comfort of a solution because there’s no solution available within the characters’ circumstances. Modern studio development would demand the solution. That demand is the loss.
That ending on the bus to Miami devastates me. Few American films have had the nerve to leave two men with nothing and refuse to apologize for it, and I admire Schlesinger enormously for holding that line. A studio today would sand it down into a lesson about getting help. That’s a cowardly instinct, because people living that life deserve a film that tells the truth about them.
2. Blazing Saddles (1974)
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“Where the white women at?”
Mel Brooks has said explicitly that Blazing Saddles couldn’t be made today, and he’s right about the mechanism if not entirely about the conclusion.
The film’s racial satire depends on the racial slurs being present because the comedy is the response to the slurs, and you can’t have the response without the thing it responds to. The white racists in the film use the language of white racists, and that makes the satirical point about white racism. Sanitizing the language sanitizes the argument.
The complication is that a contemporary studio wouldn’t trust the argument, wouldn’t trust that the audience could distinguish between the film using racist language to satirize racism and the film endorsing racist language. Richard Pryor co-wrote the script. The film was made by and with Black creative input. That context matters and would still not be sufficient protection in a contemporary studio development environment. The satire requires a trust in the audience that the contemporary industry doesn’t extend.
3. Animal House (1978)
“Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?”
Animal House contains a scene in which a character debates whether to assault an unconscious woman and decides not to, presented as comedy. This couldn’t be in the film today, and shouldn’t have been in the film in 1978.
It’s a scene about assault presented as a comedic moral dilemma, and the correct response to it in any decade is that it shouldn’t exist. That element couldn’t be made today for good reasons.
The rest of the film (the anarchic energy, the institutional subversion, Belushi’s Bluto as pure id, the style of college comedy that treats adolescent chaos as funny, not as a lesson) could be made today technically but probably wouldn’t be greenlit as written. The contemporary version would add redemption arcs, would give the female characters more agency, would resolve the chaos into something more clearly moral. The chaos is the point, and the contemporary industry doesn’t trust chaos without a resolution that validates it.
4. Klute (1971)
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“I don’t need anybody. I never will.”
Klute places a sex worker’s interior life at the center of a thriller without using her profession as either titillation or as moral problem requiring resolution. Bree Daniels isn’t trying to escape her work, not secretly ashamed of it, not saved by the male detective who falls in love with her. She’s a full person with her own psychology who happens to work in this industry, and the film’s therapy sessions (Bree talking through what her work means to her with real ambivalence) are the film’s main subject.
The thriller is the container. Bree is the content.
A contemporary studio thriller with a sex worker protagonist would either make the profession central to a rescue narrative or treat it as edgy background color. Pakula’s film treats it as simply true, as part of who this character is, deserving the same serious attention as any other element of her psychology. That non-judgment combined with real psychological curiosity is the thing the contemporary industry wouldn’t sustain for a two-hour thriller.
Bree Daniels is the reason Klute matters to me, and those therapy scenes are the best thing in it. The thriller plot around her is a fair bit weaker, and I get impatient whenever the film leaves her to follow the case. Still, I’ll take a flawed film that treats a woman like Bree this seriously over a slick one that uses her as scenery.
5. Network (1976)
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“I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”
Network’s impossibility is institutional. The film is a savage attack on television as a medium: on the commodification of outrage, the corporate machinery of news, the way that networks convert real human anger into programming. A contemporary network or streaming service wouldn’t fund a film whose central argument is that the people who made the thing you’re watching designed it to manipulate. The conflict of interest is structural and insurmountable.
Paddy Chayefsky’s screenplay has become more accurate every decade since he wrote it (reality television arrived, the 24-hour news cycle arrived, the monetization of anger arrived) and the film that predicted all of this came from, and played to, the industry it was attacking. That institutional tolerance for self-criticism doesn’t exist anymore, if it ever reliably existed. Network was possible because a studio took the bet. No contemporary studio would take this bet.
Network is a film I’d put in front of every person who owns a television, and I don’t have a complaint worth making about it. Chayefsky was angry, and you can feel that anger in every speech. It depresses me that nobody holding a checkbook today would let a writer bite the hand like this.
6. Taxi Driver (1976)
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“You talkin’ to me?”
Travis Bickle would survive contemporary development by being given a clear diagnosis, a therapeutic relationship, and a final act in which the violence is unambiguously heroic. The studio note would arrive at the script stage: we need to understand why Travis is the way he is, and we need the audience to root for him clearly. Both notes would destroy the film. The first note would explain what should remain unexplained. The second note would resolve what should remain unresolved.
Schrader’s genius was writing Travis’s psychology from the inside without providing the outside perspective that would allow comfortable categorization. Travis is a consciousness that the film inhabits without endorsing. The ambiguous ending, in which his massacre is treated as heroism or may be a dying fantasy, is the film’s honest statement about violence and recognition in America. That honesty (uncomfortable, unresolved, refusing to tell the audience what to think) is what the contemporary development process would eliminate.
7. Apocalypse Now (1979)
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“The horror. The horror.”
The impossibility of Apocalypse Now today is practical as much as creative. Coppola went over budget by $16 million, filming in the Philippines while a typhoon destroyed the sets, with Marlon Brando arriving without having read the book, Martin Sheen suffering a heart attack during production, Harvey Keitel being fired after weeks of shooting, and the director financing his own financial exposure by mortgaging his home and wine business. No contemporary studio would allow any of this to continue past week two.
The film would be shut down, the insurance claim filed, and the project shelved.
The defining quality of Apocalypse Now (the feeling that something dangerous is happening just outside the frame) is inseparable from the production’s real danger. The madness of making it contributed to the madness being depicted. Contemporary production management would eliminate the production chaos and, with it, the menace that makes the film what it is.
8. Lolita (1962)
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“How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?”
Kubrick’s own tagline asks the question that still applies. Nabokov’s novel is one of the great works of literature because Humbert Humbert is the most unreliable narrator in fiction, a man who constructs a self-justifying account of his abuse so seductively written that the reader must constantly remember they’re inside the abuser’s perspective. The film has to find a cinematic equivalent for this, and Kubrick does it through Peter Sellers’s Quilty and through moments that break Humbert’s controlled narration.
A studio could make the film today. The subject matter, handled honestly, isn’t inherently unfilmable. What a studio couldn’t make is the seductiveness of Humbert’s voice: a contemporary studio would require the film to signal its horror more explicitly, to provide the corrective perspective Nabokov withholds. The 1997 Adrian Lyne version shows exactly this problem, it provides too much corrective perspective and loses the discomfort that makes the novel great.
I respect Kubrick’s Lolita more than I enjoy it. Sellers is a delight and the film finds clever ways around what it couldn’t show, but it never gets close to the queasy pull of Nabokov’s voice, and that voice is the whole reason the book matters. The Lyne version proves how hard this is to get right. I’d still point anyone curious toward the novel first.
9. A Clockwork Orange (1971)
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“I was cured all right.”
Kubrick’s film makes an argument that no contemporary studio would fund: that a violent man who chooses violence freely is more human than a conditioned man who can’t choose at all. This isn’t an argument for violence (it’s an argument about free will and the horror of its removal) but the distinction wouldn’t survive the development process. The film’s sympathetic treatment of Alex’s subjectivity, its visual pleasure in his violence, and its argument that the state’s correction of him is the greater crime would all be flagged as problems.
Kubrick withdrew the film from British distribution himself after copycat violence was reported. That’s its own complication. The film’s director believed it was having real-world effects and chose restriction over availability. The contemporary impossibility is more mundane: a studio pitch meeting about an ultraviolent film that argues against the rehabilitation of violent offenders wouldn’t produce a greenlight in any room that also produces Marvel films.
10. Revenge of the Nerds (1984)
“All jocks ever think about is sports. All nerds think about is sex.”
Lewis disguises himself as Betty’s boyfriend to have sex with her without her consent. The film presents this as a romantic triumph and has Betty fall in love with Lewis as a result. This is assault presented as comedy and as the beginning of a love story. It was wrong in 1984. The film also installs a hidden camera in a sorority house and sells the footage to the campus. Also assault. The film presents both as the nerds’ victorious revenge against the system that oppressed them.
No studio can make the film today, for entirely correct reasons. The comedy of the underdog’s triumph requires that the underdog not build the triumph on crimes against the people they’re supposedly triumphing over. There’s no honest defense of these specific scenes. The film’s nostalgia fanbase argues that viewers should understand it in context. The context was also wrong.
Revenge of the Nerds disgusts me. The “harmless eighties fun” defense doesn’t hold up for me, because the jokes only land if you shrug off what the nerds did to Betty and the women in that sorority house. Losing this film costs cinema nothing, and I’d be happy never to see it on a streaming menu again.
11. Heathers (1988)
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“Dear Diary: Heather told me she teaches people real life. She teaches me the value of being cruel.”
Heathers is unmakeable today because of its refusal to signal suitable horror at its own subject matter, high school murder. The film treats the murders as dark comedy, the school’s grief response as satirical target, and the guidance counselor’s therapeutic language as the film’s primary object of contempt. A contemporary version would have to include real consequences, real grief, real horror, all of which would destroy the film’s argument that the institutional language of sensitivity is itself a form of violence against honesty.
It’s using murder as a device to get at something true about high school social dynamics and the hypocrisy of institutional responses to teenage suffering. That distinction, using transgressive content as a vehicle for real insight, requires a trust in the audience that the contemporary studio system doesn’t extend to high school comedies about murder.
12. Basic Instinct (1992)
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“What are you going to do, charge me with smoking?”
Basic Instinct was protested on its release by LGBTQ activists who objected to the film’s coding of bisexuality as predatory and dangerous (every bisexual character in the film is either a killer or a suspect) and the protest had legitimate grounds. The sexuality of the film (the interrogation scene, Sharon Stone’s performance) isn’t the problem and should be filmable today. The construction of bisexual identity as tied to violence and manipulation is the element the contemporary industry would correctly not produce.
The complication is that Basic Instinct is also an effective thriller that uses its sexuality as real plot and character mechanics. Stripping the sexuality to remove the offensive coding would produce a much weaker thriller. The correct approach would be to rebuild the film’s sexuality without the bisexual-as-predator coding, possible in theory, requiring a different script in practice.
13. Natural Born Killers (1994)
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“The only thing that kills the demon is love.”
Oliver Stone’s film was blamed for inspiring copycat violence, sued by victims of crimes committed by people who claimed the film as inspiration, and condemned by politicians across the political spectrum. It’s also a formally radical film about the media’s relationship to violence (the way that celebrity, spectacle, and news coverage convert actual murders into entertainment) that uses its own visual excess as a critique of visual excess. The form is the argument.
Studios now wouldn’t fund a film whose central argument is that media coverage of violence is itself a form of violence, both because the institutional conflict of interest is too direct and because the formal aggression (multiple film stocks, animation, sitcom parody, music video aesthetics within a single scene) would be rejected as uncommercial. Stone made the film that the argument required. That alignment of form and argument, at this level of formal aggression, doesn’t survive contemporary development.
My feelings about Natural Born Killers are split. I admire the nerve of it, and the sitcom parody still disturbs me the way Stone wanted. But the film is so loud for so long that it tires me, and by the end I’ve stopped thinking about the media and started waiting for it to finish. It deserves to exist, and I don’t much want to sit through it again.
14. Hardcore (1979)
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“Turn it off.”
Paul Schrader’s film about a Calvinist father descending into the Los Angeles sex industry to find his missing daughter is on this list with some irony. Hardcore itself capitulated to commercial pressure and gave its story the rescue ending it hadn’t earned.
Nobody could have made the right version of this film in 1979, and it’s definitely impossible today: the version in which the father finds his daughter, understands that nothing can undo what happened to her, and returns to Grand Rapids without her because there’s no version of the reunion that heals what was broken.
The real version of Hardcore’s story is too bleak for any commercial market. The bleakness is the truth: that the trauma inflicted on Kristen doesn’t end when her father arrives, that a Calvinist structure has no tools for what has happened, that the reunion the film delivers is a lie that the film’s own architecture reveals as a lie. The honest film exists in the gap between what Schrader built and what he was willing to deliver.
Hardcore frustrates me because I can see the great film buried in it. For most of its running time it’s Schrader at his bleakest, and then the ending loses its nerve and hands me a reunion I don’t believe. I still like the film, and I’d take it over most tidy thrillers, but that last act feels like a studio note with a gun to its head.
15. Goodfellas (1990)
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“As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.”
Goodfellas could technically be made today. The violence, the language, the subject matter are all within contemporary bounds. What couldn’t survive the development process is the film’s relationship to its own glamour. The film makes the mob life look appealing (the money, the status, the meals, the pleasure of belonging to something) for its entire first half, before showing the cost. A contemporary studio note would arrive asking for more distancing language, more signaling of the moral problem, less apparent endorsement of the lifestyle.
The note would destroy the film. Scorsese’s argument depends on the appeal being real. The audience must want what Henry wants to understand why he made the choices he made. A film that hedges the appeal can’t make the argument. The contemporary development instinct to moralize in advance of the moral is the instinct that Scorsese’s best work resists.
16. Requiem for a Dream (2000)
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“I’m somebody now.”
Requiem for a Dream ends with four characters in states of absolute destruction (amputation, institutionalization, prison, catatonia) and offers none of them the slightest possibility of recovery. Aronofsky shot the film the way he did to produce the experience of addiction instead of the observation of it: the split screens, the time-lapse photography, the hip-hop montage, the sound design that makes the drugs feel like ecstasy and withdrawal feel like horror. The film received an NC-17 and was released unrated. No studio would fund it today and no major studio would distribute it.
The contemporary treatment of addiction in mainstream film requires either recovery or a clear cautionary structure in which the costs are visible enough to work as deterrent. Requiem doesn’t deter, it implicates. The film makes the initial experience of the drugs beautiful, the real thing to do and the thing that makes later destruction meaningful. A film that doesn’t make addiction understandable can’t honestly depict its destruction.
17. American Beauty (1999)
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“It’s a great thing when you realize you still have the ability to surprise yourself.”
The events surrounding Kevin Spacey have made American Beauty‘s central dynamic impossible to separate from what those events revealed about Spacey himself (a middle-aged man’s sexual obsession with a teenage girl, presented as the awakening of authentic desire) and the retrospective discomfort is legitimate. The discomfort was always available on first viewing. The film presents Lester’s predatory obsession with Angela as liberation and treats as genuine a fantasy that’s the middle-aged man’s refusal of reality.
Today no studio could make that fantasy, and none should have made it as presented in 1999, because the film’s endorsement of Lester’s perspective as authentic self-discovery is the problem. A film that examined the same fantasy from outside Lester’s perspective instead of inside it would be both filmable and more honest.
18. Falling Down (1993)
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“I’m the bad guy? How did that happen?”
Joel Schumacher’s film about a white man snapping under the accumulated pressures of modern life is an interesting premise that the film executes with a political problem: D-FENS directs his rage primarily at Korean shop owners, Latino gang members, and homeless people, and the film presents it with considerable sympathy. The film’s ending, in which D-FENS discovers he’s the villain, attempts to pull back from the sympathetic framing, but the film has already established the sympathy and the pull-back arrives too late to undo it.
The premise (a man whose formation as a white middle-class American hasn’t prepared him for the world as it exists) is interesting and could be made today. The targets of D-FENS’s rage, and the film’s sympathy for his frustration with those targets, is the element that reflects the politics of its cultural moment and wouldn’t survive a contemporary production.
19. Do the Right Thing (1989)
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“That’s the truth, Ruth.”
Do the Right Thing wasn’t nominated for Best Picture in 1989 and a major reason cited at the time was the film’s ending: the riot, the burning of Sal’s pizzeria, the contradictory quotes from Martin Luther King and Malcolm X that refuse to resolve the film’s argument into a single position. Audiences and critics who expected the film to tell them what to think about race in America were frustrated that it refused to.
That refusal is exactly what makes the film great and exactly what would prevent a major studio from making it today.
The contemporary version would be required to resolve: whose side are we on, what’s the right thing, who’s the villain. Lee’s film holds all of these questions open because nobody can resolve them from outside the community the film depicts. A studio that needs its films to have a clear moral would destroy the film at the development stage.
20. Blue Velvet (1986)
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“It’s a strange world, Sandy.”
Critics have faulted Lynch’s film, legitimately, for its treatment of Dorothy Vallens, a woman whose abuse and degradation the film presents with a quality of aesthetic appreciation that it doesn’t entirely counterbalance with moral judgment. Isabella Rossellini’s performance is extraordinary; the film’s relationship to what happens to her character is more complicated. Lynch has acknowledged that the film comes from a place in his own psychology that he hasn’t entirely reconciled.
The film’s darkness isn’t the problem. The darkness is the point, and the point is correct. What makes it complicated is the visual attention Lynch brings to Dorothy’s suffering, which sometimes reads as aesthetic appreciation of the suffering. A contemporary version could make the same argument about the darkness beneath suburban normalcy while treating Dorothy’s experience with more moral clarity. Whether that version would be as powerful is a legitimate question.
Blue Velvet is my kind of nightmare, and I’d put it beside anything Lynch ever made. My one reservation is how long the camera lingers on Dorothy’s suffering; there are moments where it seems to be admiring the pain. Rossellini gave that role everything, and she deserved a film that protected her character a little more. Even so, no other film I know gets at the darkness under a tidy suburb the way this one does.
21. Leaving Las Vegas (1995)
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“I want you to let me drink. I need you to be okay with that.”
Mike Figgis’s film is built around an agreement that no contemporary studio would permit as the film’s central emotional premise: Ben will drink himself to death, Sera won’t try to stop him, and the film won’t require either of them to reconsider. The contemporary development instinct would produce, at minimum, a scene in which Sera attempts to get Ben help. This scene’s absence is correct, because it’s established that the agreement is real and that violating it would be the wrong thing for Sera to do given what Ben needs.
Its specific quality comes from honoring the agreement completely. From treating Ben’s decision to die as his decision, not as a problem to be solved, and from treating Sera’s choice to honor that decision as an act of love instead of enabling. A contemporary studio would see enabling. The film sees love. The distinction is the film, and it wouldn’t survive development.
22. Fight Club (1999)
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“The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club.”
Fight Club’s impossibility today isn’t creative but contextual. The film is a satire of masculine rage and the fantasy of male violence as liberation. Tyler Durden is the protagonist’s delusion, and the film treats the ideology he represents as a symptom of the protagonist’s damage. This is the film that Fincher and Palahniuk made. The film that a significant portion of the audience received is a celebration of exactly what it was satirizing.
Any studio today would pass on Fight Club because it couldn’t control how audiences would receive the film, the same problem Kubrick encountered with A Clockwork Orange. The satire is real; the risk that viewers will mistake the satire for endorsement is also real. The contemporary response to this risk isn’t to trust the audience. The film requires that trust.
Fight Club sits right at the top of my list for Fincher, and people who remember a film this sharp as a pep talk for the rage it’s mocking have missed the joke. The clues are all on screen, and once you see Tyler for what he is, the film gets funnier and darker at once. I’d rather a studio take that risk and have some viewers misread it than stop making films with teeth.
23. Platoon (1986)
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“I think now, looking back, we did not fight the enemy. We fought ourselves.”
Oliver Stone’s film depicts American soldiers burning a Vietnamese village and killing civilians, including the scene in which Barnes executes a Vietnamese woman in front of her family, and presents this not as an aberration but as a consequence of what the war made of the men fighting it. A contemporary studio producing a military film wouldn’t depict American soldiers committing atrocities with this level of directness and without a counter-narrative that distances institutional America from the men’s actions.
The cultural moment of the mid-1980s, in which Vietnam was far enough in the past to be examined honestly and close enough to still be felt, made the film possible. The contemporary military film is, with very rare exceptions, either hagiographic or focused on enemy atrocities. Platoon’s honesty about what the war made of the Americans who fought it is the thing the industry’s relationship to the military wouldn’t permit.
Platoon hurts to watch, and that’s why I admire it. Stone doesn’t let me hide behind the flag or behind the comfortable idea that only the enemy does monstrous things. It saddens me that so many war films now play like recruiting posters with a budget, because a film like this one could tell young viewers what combat does to the men sent into it.
24. The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
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“It puts the lotion on its skin.”
The Silence of the Lambs explicitly states that Buffalo Bill isn’t a real transsexual, Dr. Lecter makes this point to Clarice. And the filmmakers consulted with trans advocacy organizations at the time. The coding of the film’s serial killer around gender identity anxiety and cross-dressing is nonetheless present, and people have debated it since the film’s release. The visual language around Buffalo Bill (the dancing scene, the tuck, the way he presents himself) reads differently in a contemporary context than it did in 1991.
As a thriller (Lecter, Clarice, the investigation), it’s entirely filmable today and would be excellent. The construction of Buffalo Bill would require reworking in ways that might or might not improve the film. This is a complicated case instead of a clear loss or gain.
25. Full Metal Jacket (1987)
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“Inside every gook there is an American trying to get out.”
Kubrick’s film presents Marine training as a process designed to eliminate individual identity and install a killing machine: and presents the result of that process, in Pyle’s case, as the destruction of a human being who becomes dangerous because the process worked. The film’s argument is that the institution produces what it intends to produce, and what it intends to produce isn’t compatible with continued psychological survival in everyone it processes.
These days a studio would require the training to be presented as difficult but productive, the drill instructor to be harsh but caring, and the outcome to be soldiers instead of casualties.
What makes it unfundable with studio money today is its relationship to the military establishment. The DOD’s cooperation with film productions (which provides military hardware, locations, and personnel in exchange for script approval) would require changes that would gut the film. Kubrick shot in England and built his own Vietnam. That independence is the condition of the film’s honesty.
The first half of Full Metal Jacket is as frightening as anything Kubrick shot, and Pyle stays with me longer than I’d like. The second half never quite matches it, which is my only real complaint. What moves me is that Kubrick bought his honesty by going it alone, and anyone who thinks basic training is a montage with a pep talk ought to see what that independence paid for.
The Verdict Breakdown
Hollywood’s Loss (13 films)
Films the industry will no longer fund because its risk tolerance for real difficulty has collapsed and it’s become more conservative about what it’ll allow audiences to experience without a safety net.
Cinema’s Gain (2 films)
Films that couldn’t be made today for reasons that reflect real social progress, elements that were harmful when made and remain harmful in retrospect. The industry’s refusal to produce these specific elements is correct.
Complicated (10 films)
Films where some elements couldn’t be made today for good reasons and some for bad ones. The answer requires distinguishing between them instead of treating the entire film as either a loss or a gain.
The ratio matters: thirteen real losses, two real gains, ten complicated cases. The common narrative that contemporary Hollywood has simply become too restrictive for great cinema isn’t entirely wrong. But it’s considerably less wrong about studio risk tolerance than it is about social progress. The industry’s cowardice is real. So is some of the progress. Both things can be true.
This list leaves me more angry than hopeful. Nobody’s going to film another Revenge of the Nerds, and I don’t miss a frame of it. I miss the studios willing to bet on Network and Midnight Cowboy, and an industry that calls its fear good taste has run out of excuses. If you want difficult films to come back, find the ones still being made and pay to see them.
Which film on this list could still be made today?
The verdict labels are the most debatable element of this list. Drop your disagreements in the comments, especially if you think any of the Complicated entries belong in a different category.
