Home › Best noir of the 1970s.
New Hollywood gave noir its edge back. The most paranoid decade in American cinema — a decade in which the government really was conspiring against its own citizens, in which the institutions that were supposed to protect you were revealed to be corrupt at every level. The films made in this climate reflect it with extraordinary precision.
Kubrick adapts Burgess. Malcolm McDowell as Alex DeLarge. Ultra-violence and the State reclaiming the body through aversion therapy. A film about free will, institutional power, and the question of whether a person who can no longer choose to do evil has been rehabilitated or simply lobotomized.
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The perfect paranoia film. See the beginner's guide.
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The great American crime epic. A Sicilian-American mafia family over three decades. Marlon Brando as Don Vito Corleone. Al Pacino as Michael, the son who swore he would never be part of the family business and becomes the most ruthless don of all. Coppola made a film about America itself — about power, family loyalty, and the corrupting influence of violence. Nino Rota's score. Gordon Willis's cinematography.
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The sequel that surpasses the original. Michael's story in the present, Vito's origin story in the past, intercut. Robert De Niro as young Vito. The parallel construction shows us exactly what Michael has become by showing us who his father was and how different the two men are despite their similar positions.
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Scorsese before the budgets. Harvey Keitel holding everything together while Robert De Niro burns it all down.
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Suburban kids with nothing to do turn on everyone. Matt Dillon debut. Inspired Nirvana. Nobody has seen it.
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Al Pacino robs a bank in Brooklyn to pay for his partner's surgery. Based on a true story. Lumet made a film that is simultaneously a thriller, a comedy, and one of the most empathetic portraits of desperation in American cinema. Attica. Attica.
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A Coney Island gang has to travel from the Bronx back to Coney Island through every gang in New York after being framed for a murder. Walter Hill made a film that feels like a comic book come to life — stylized, kinetic, operating by its own internal logic. Can you dig it.
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The Godfather (1972), The Conversation (1974), Mean Streets (1973), and A Clockwork Orange (1971) are the essential crime films of the 1970s.
The 1970s coincided with New Hollywood — a period of creative freedom in American cinema, combined with genuine social and political paranoia that gave crime films unusual urgency and moral complexity.