Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970) Review
I have watched this more times than is defensible. A film about a computer, a requirements document and a mountain, and the machine is never once broken.
Tag: 1970s
The 1970s made cinema for adults: paranoid, grainy, and unafraid of bad endings. This tag collects reviews of 1970s films, the decade when American movies took their biggest risks and banked their deepest classics.
1970sThe Pyx (1973) Review
The Pyx (1973) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A Canadian film in which a woman falls from a Montreal balcony and the investigation runs backward through her last days, intercut, with Karen Black singing her own…
1970sStreet Girls (1975) Review
Street Girls (1975) rates 3 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A father searches Eugene, Oregon for a daughter who has disappeared into the local trade, in a film co-written by Barry Levinson seven years before he directed anything,…
1970sLooking for Mr. Goodbar (1977) Review
Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Diane Keaton plays a teacher of deaf children who spends her nights in bars, in a film that is genuinely good for ninety minutes and then…
1970sStar Trek: The Animated Series (1973-1974) Review
Star Trek: The Animated Series rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Twenty-two episodes, atrocious Filmation animation, and writing good enough that it holds up anyway. The first Star Trek to win an Emmy, for an episode from…
1970sZombie (1979) / Flesh Eaters Review
Zombie (1979) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Lucio Fulci was hired to make an unauthorized sequel to Dawn of the Dead and made something older instead, closer to Caribbean voodoo horror than to Romero. It contains…
1970sThe Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) Review
The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A revenge Western that abandons the revenge about halfway through and becomes a film about a man accumulating a family he keeps trying to leave behind.…
1970sJeremiah Johnson (1972) Review
Jeremiah Johnson (1972) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A man goes into the mountains to be alone and the film spends two hours on the practical difficulty of that. Almost no dialogue, real winter, and a…
1970sKings of the Road (1976) Review
Kings of the Road (1976) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Two men drive a repair truck along the East German border servicing dying cinemas, for a hundred and seventy-five minutes, with almost no plot. It was…
1970sFive Easy Pieces (1970) Review
Five Easy Pieces (1970) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A concert pianist is working an oil rig and pretending he never had another life. The diner scene is the most quoted and the least representative thing…
1970sBadlands (1973) Review
Badlands (1973) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Malick's first film takes a real killing spree and narrates it in the voice of a fifteen-year-old girl who describes murder in the vocabulary of a movie magazine. The…
1970sJaws (1975) Review
Jaws (1975) rates 10 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. The mechanical shark did not work, the schedule ran three times over, and the failure produced the technique. Spielberg was twenty-seven and had to build suspense out of everything…