1. STAR WARS

Up until Star Wars, sci-fi was considered hokey, immature, kids stuff. For the most parts adults wouldn't see it, unless it was super artistic and not exactly fun, like "2001." With this movie came a new hope. Ahope for a day when May would come, and plots would step aside for effects, one liners could clip out introspective soliloquies. While it is one hell of a movie, duh, it also paved the way for years of imitators right up to "Battlefield Earth."

2. JAWS

After years of Hitchcock, but more importantly knock offs of him, horror was becoming stale. Sure, there were Hammer films, Argento, all the foreign stuff, but here in America it was getting thin by '75. Suddenly, a big shark eats a kid and people run from the beach and straight to the multiplex. It's the best made example of this decade's fears. Stuck between periods of paranoia and self importance, a majority of films featured not an actual villain, but a force of nature. Earthquakes, sharks, floods, fires, and crappy planes were a threat. Nothing personal, just dumb luck situations.

3. ASSAULT ON PRECICNT 13

Far better than Walter Hill's popular knock off "The Warriors," this movie took the concept of "Rio Bravo" and placed it in the context of gang violence. Instead of just feeling generally surrounded and trapped by the gangs and crime in bad neighborshoods, this movie made it literal. It was smart, suspenseful, and a great career boost for newcomer John Carpenter. Oddly, it didn't initially do too well in the U.S., possibly because it hit too close to home.

4. NETWORK

A brilliant, and somewhat prophetic movie, about the amount of control television has on people. At the time, cable was just beginning, and Super TV pretty much sucked, so there was no "Jackass" or "Beavis and Butthead." Therefore we didn't have people trying to light themselves on fire or try and jump over cars, but the power has been there, and building up for some time. We're dumb as hell and we ARE gonna take it!

5. SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER

As far as style, music, attitude, and misguided taste, this movie IS the 70's. I can't say it's an all time favorite, but I will say they should never have done a live stage show. My god, is nothing too tacky for Broadway? I hear next year they plan to do a musical version of "Project: Alf" with Bernadette Peters and Mandy Patinkin.

1. APOCALYPSE NOW

Where have you gone Francis Coppola? You could argue that the grueling shoot of this, the greatest Vietnam movie ever made, burnt out the auteur that brought us THE GODFATHER I & II previous to 1979, and then JACK and THE COTTON CLUB, after. As a big fan of both THE GODFATHER III and THE RAINMAKER, I would disagree. I will say that his work has never been more passionate or more personal, before or after making this. Coppola battled through numerous rewrtites, swealtering heat, budget inflation and the "death" of star Martin Sheen, to compile the six plus hours of footage that encompass the whole of his original vision. Reduced drastically for it's initial release, it met with mixed reviews. Now, more then twenty years later, it is considered a masterpiece and has been, quite successfully, rereleased in an extended (though far from six hour) director's cut.

2. STAR WARS

If I have to explain this one to you...GET THE FUCK OFF MY WEBSITE!!!!!!!

3. THE GODFATHER

Again, this film needs no introduction. Coppola, one of the decades premier filmmakers, is at his second best here. As much as APOCOLYPSE NOW was winding and surreal, THE GODFATHER is close knit and accessable. Marlon Brando would never be this good again, but, only because he stopped trying.

4. ALIEN

The seventies were the golden age of The Filmmaker. The Auteur. The director as a complete artist, not just the pawn of a studio or producer. The films they put together were revolutionary and exciting. While Coppola, Spielberg and Lucas may be the first names to come to mind, let's not forget Ridley Scott. Scott's paranoid space flick is one of the most tense and frightening thrillers ever made. The creature in shadows, the crew lost and newly awakened, trying to catch up and survive. ALIEN may not be as action packed as Jimmy Cameron's sequel and is certainly not as bizarre as the third and fourth installments, but it is the film that launched a thousand followers.

5. ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST

In the pantheon of seventies directors Milos Forman is often lost. Not without good reason, the man only made three American features in the decade. Suffice to say, Forman isn't excatly what you'd call prolific. The dude has only made eight movies in the past thirty years. When he does step behind the camera, though, the result is worth the wait. CUCKOOS NEST is the film that put him on the map in this country. Actors typically seem to do there best work for Forman, he even directed F. Murray Abraham to the Oscars in AMADEUS. This film springboarded the career of Danny DeVito (don't know how good that is) and solidified Jack Nicholson as a legend in the making. CUCKOOS NEST is one of the few truly great movies made in the seventies about the seventies that wasn't set in Vietnam. It speaks for it's decades ideas and frustrations.

1. THE GODFATHER

Goodfellas, Shmoodfellas. That's right, Shmoodfellas! And for that matter, Shmopranos! Long before Big Pussy was anything more than a really great club in Atlantic City, there was FFC's deeply serious, deeply excellent take on mob life with those whacky Corleones (note: the original title, "The Whacky Corleones" was nixed by novelist Mario Puzo. It was later used as the title of a sitcom on the WB).

2. THE STING

After the success of BUTCH, Redford passed his mustache off to Newman and the pair reteamed with director George Roy Hill for this seminal con artist movie. It won a lot of Oscars (back in a time when well-made popcorn movies won Oscars and it didn't feel like a total robbery), and weirdly enough, co-writer David S. Ward went on to pen the Major League trilogy. Sometimes the magic leaves and never comes back, I guess.

3. ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN

No other movie quite taps into the post-Watergate paranoia like this movie ... which is about where the post-Watergate paranoia came from in the first place. Sharply scripted by William Goldman, and directed with an elegantly taut pace by the late Alan Pakula, this movie actually makes for a scintillating watch, which is weird cause it's basically about a bunch of Republican nerds and how badly they fucked up.

4. STAR WARS

Oh, like there's anything else that needs to be said. Fuckin' great movie.

5. THE OMEN

Fuck The Exorcist, and fuck Rosemary's Baby. The real fruition of 70's supernatural horror came not with either of those overly-stylish, underly-interesting flicks, but in the form of this kickass popcorn-tosser which pits Gregory Peck and David Warner against the son of the devil. Best son-of-Satan movie till End of Days. Which sucked. So, basically, yeah, best ever.