They didn’t know it at the time, but when film fans woozily awoke on New Year’s Day 1975, they were entering one of the most electrifying years in Hollywood cinematic history.
Over the next 12 months, a slate of remarkable films arrived one by one, offering a rich buffet of thematic and visual thrills for viewers while representing a high-water mark for directors, screenwriters, cinematographers, actors and almost everyone else on set. In 2025, those towering films reach another milestone: age 50.
They include Steven Spielberg’s box-office smash Jaws, Sidney Lumet’s acclaimed Dog Day Afternoon, Miloš Forman’s sad-yet-funny One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, plus Hal Ashby’s very starry comedy Shampoo (which introduced the wider world to 18-year-old Carrie Fisher), Sydney Pollack’s equally starry political thriller Three Days of the Condor, and Stanley Kubrick’s lush historical epic Barry Lyndon, to name just six. Half of these have Rotten Tomatoes ratings above 90, two sit at 87.
Even in a spectacular decade that saw the release of multiple objective masterpieces – The Exorcist, Annie Hall, The Way We Were, The French Connection, Taxi Driver, The Godfather, Chinatown, Star Wars, The Parallax View, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, A Clockwork Orange, Alien, Apocalypse Now, Harold and Maude, Rocky, The Conversation – 1975 was a titan year, its Oscar race genuinely white-knuckle.
While all these films are essential viewing, on the 50th anniversary of those from 1975 we singled out three for a deeper dive, while also gamely blinking into the fragile winter light of 2025 to see what new releases may just be likewise considered as game-changers 50 years from now.
Jaws
Stars: Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss
Director: Steven Spielberg
Released: June 20, 1975
Masterstroke: Before Jaws, the concept of the summer blockbuster didn’t exist. In fact, summertime had been considered a dumping ground for lesser movies, much as January is today. Universal Pictures changed all that, pouring millions into clever mainstream advertising of its thriller helmed by a 28-year-old Spielberg – then with only one cinematic feature and a TV movie on his CV – opening it simultaneously in 409 American theatres. (By comparison, The Godfather spent its first week in five theatres before expanding). Jaws, or more specifically, its record-shattering box office success, changed the movie-marketing playbook forever. And, of course, it alerted the world to a monumental new filmmaker while cementing Spielberg’s relationship with composer John Williams, whom the director had tapped to score his 1974 debut, Sugarland Express. Williams won an Oscar for his Jaws score. (The film also picked up best film editing and best sound Oscars.) Sidebar: the decades-long and very fruitful Spielberg/Williams relationship is winningly explored in the recent documentary, Music by John Williams.
Fun Fact: There are a million, but a fascinating appendix was added decades after the film’s release when Ian Shaw, son of, and dead-ringer for, veteran British actor Robert Shaw – who played crusty veteran fisherman Quint in Jaws – starred as the old man in The Shark Is Broken. The three-man stage play is a fictional depiction of a particularly challenging day on the set of Jaws which was a notoriously troubled production that went over-schedule, over-budget and was plagued by a chronically malfunctioning mechanical shark (not to mention tensions between its cast members, notably Shaw and Dreyfuss). The Shark is Broken has received raves and heads to the U.K. and Ireland in 2025.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Stars: Jack Nicholson, Louise Fletcher, Danny DeVito
Director: Miloš Forman
Released: November 19, 1975
Masterstroke: If only all dramas aged as well as Forman’s staggeringly poignant film about a devious but good-hearted crook (Nicholson) who fakes mental illness to serve time in a psychiatric hospital, thinking it will be an easier ride than prison. There, he discovers horrors beyond his imagination at the hands of Nurse Ratched (Fletcher), whose chilling lack of sympathy for her vulnerable charges triggers a devastating series of tragedies. Filmed on location at an actual psychiatric hospital in Oregon, the action scans as disturbingly real even when – perhaps especially when – it’s funny. No surprise, Cuckoo’s Nest went on to win five marquee Academy Awards – best picture, best actor, best actress, director, and screenplay – and remains one of only three films to achieve that feat. (The others were 1934s It Happened One Night and 1991s The Silence of the Lambs). The late Fletcher used sign language to thank her deaf parents when she accepted her best actress Oscar.
Fun Fact: One of the film’s two producers was, at the time, a fledgling actor known mainly for his role as a rookie cop in the TV police procedural The Streets of San Francisco. His name was Michael Douglas and he knew about the project because his legendary father, Kirk Douglas, had optioned Ken Kesey’s source material years before for stage and film rights but couldn’t get the latter off the ground. Son lobbied father to let him run with it, with much subsequent success.
Dog Day Afternoon
Stars: Al Pacino, John Cazale
Director: Sidney Lumet
Released: September 21, 1975
Masterstroke: In this present moment in time, when the rights of transgender people are being challenged by political opponents and extinguished by courts, Dog Day Afternoon – Lumet’s gripping reading of a true story about a man who attempts a bank robbery to pay for his lover’s gender confirmation surgery, failing spectacularly along the way – seems uncomfortably prescient. While the film focuses on the circus-like atmosphere surrounding the Brooklyn bank the robbers target (and the ensuing hostage crisis), the film’s heart is Pacino as Sonny Wortzik, a desperate but determined man battling enormous odds to achieve his goal. It doesn’t get more real than that.
Fun Fact: Much of the dialogue was improvised to maintain the film’s urgency. Indeed, one of its most iconic scenes, when Sonny exits the bank, sees the assembled crowd, and shouts “Attica! Attica!” – invoking the 1971 Attica Prison riot – was unscripted. Proof can be seen in the confused look on actor Charles Durning’s face as his police negotiator character looks on.
Incoming for 2025
While it’s impossible to predict how this new year will register in cinematic history, a few pending titles show immense promise.
Mickey 17, director Bong Joon Ho’s much-delayed follow-up to his brilliant Oscar-winning drama Parasite from 2019 stars Robert Pattinson as an “expendable” or infinitely regenerating clone sent to colonize a hostile planet. At once high-concept and slapstick, the sci-fi black comedy (you don’t write those words in the same sentence every day) co-stars Toni Collette, Steve Yeun, and Mark Ruffalo. In theatres April 18.
F1, from director Joseph Kosinski, has high standards to beat – notably Ron Howard’s Rush from 2013 and Asif Kapadia’s superb 2010 documentary Senna, about the legendary Brazilian driver Ayrton Senna. Then again, how can a Formula One picture with a cast including Brad Pitt and Javier Bardem fail to thrill? In theatres June 27.
Glimpses of writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! – a riff on 1935s Bride of Frankenstein set in 1930s-era Chicago and featuring Christian Bale as Frankenstein and Jessie Buckley as his reanimated murder-victim companion – look spectacular… and very creepy. Oh, and it’s a musical. In theatres September 26.
Our toes are also curling in anticipation of Tom Cruise, Simon Pegg, and Ving Rhames in the eighth instalment of Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (May 23) and Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another (August), starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro, and Regina Hall. Sounds like a very good bet.
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