1975 was one of those years where cinema didn’t just show off—it reshaped the landscape. Spielberg invented the modern blockbuster with Jaws. Kubrick made aristocratic dystopia look gorgeous with Barry Lyndon. Altman wrangled chaos into brilliance with Nashville. And if you wanted something stranger, sleazier, or more politically charged, you had Pasolini, Herzog, and a wave of international filmmakers pushing boundaries that still feel shocking today. It was a year where Hollywood muscle met arthouse audacity, where pulp sat comfortably beside prestige, and where nearly every corner of film (from horror to melodrama to political documentary) delivered something unforgettable. So here it is: the best movies of 1975, a lineup that proves one year can hold multitudes, and that cinema in the mid-70s was firing on every cylinder imaginable.
These are the 50 Greatest Movies Turning 50 in 2025.
50. Switchblade Sisters
Jack Hill is one of the directors Tarantino won’t shut up about and for good reason. He appreciates grindhouse movies with a pulse and will overlook technical proficiency if he notices a real storyteller’s voice underneath the flaws, and Hill fits that to a T. He only made a handful of films, all of which were the textbook definition of no-budget, but the majority of them are memorable because he knew how to ground a movie in genuine emotional stakes, while also providing action packed thrills with no money.
Horror fans may associate his name with the incredibly strange Spider Baby or, The Maddest Story Ever Told, while blaxploitation fans almost definitely recognize his name because he delivered the one-two punch of Coffy and Foxy Brown, the films that solidified Pam Grier’s stardom within the genre, but real connoisseurs of B-level sleeve will forever tie him to the Switchblade Sisters. The film’s plot is deceptively simple: Lace (Robbie Lee) is the queen bee of The Dagger Debs, an all-girl gang running shotgun with their male counterparts, The Silver Daggers. Enter Maggie (Joanne Nail), a new recruit with sharp reflexes and sharper knives, and suddenly Lace’s kingdom starts cracking.
Jealousy ignites. Loyalty fractures. Knives come out. It’s high school politics reimagined as a blood sport. On the surface, it’s pure exploitation: catfights, prison riots, a villain in a wheelchair who looks like he escaped from a Bond set, and more switchblades than every 1950s movie bully ever had combined. But Hill isn’t just stacking bodies for shock value. Beneath the sleaze is a commentary on power, control, and the cost of carving out space in a man’s world. The men here? Props at best, predators at worst. The real story is about women claiming dominance in a system designed to chew them up. The Switchblade Sisters isn’t just an exploitation flick—it’s a feminist landmine dressed in grindhouse drag.
49. That Most Important Thing: Love
Żuławski’s voice is so clear as a director that most have only seen his film Possession, and that’s enough to paint a clear picture of his entire filmography. The themes, motifs, and tone of that film carry over throughout all of his films. The only thing that doesn’t carry over is the squid monster sex, unfortunately. You would think with a title like The Most Important Thing: Love would be the outlier since it sounds like a rom-com, but it’s just as emotionally devastating as any of his films. The story revolves around Nadine (Romy Schneider), an actress stuck in softcore trash to pay the bills. She’s talented but broke, and her dignity is on life support. Enter Servais (Fabio Testi), a photographer who falls for her and decides to help her get better roles.
Which sounds sweet until you realize that in Żuławski’s world, helping someone means creating a cyclone of emotional destruction in the process. Servais isn’t a knight in shining armor; he’s a guy with great hair and no concept of boundaries. This isn’t a love triangle so much as a love demolition derby. Nadine has a husband, Servais has an obsession, and everyone has issues. Real, screaming, glass-breaking issues. Then Klaus Kinski shows up. An actor who doesn’t steal scenes—he kidnaps them, demands a ransom, and burns the money. By the end, you’re not sure if you’ve watched a romance or a nervous breakdown disguised as one. Either way, it’s gripping. Żuławski doesn’t care about making love beautiful. He wants to make it feral, and he succeeds.
48. Graveyard of Honor
If Kinji Fukasaku had a mission in the 1970s, it was to rip the myth out of the yakuza film and replace it with blood, chaos, and the stink of desperation. That is ultimately the difference between Western and Eastern gang films. One glamorizes everything about life while the other accurately depicts the harsh reality of that world. Graveyard of Honor might be his bleakest achievement. There are no codes, no loyalty, no romance. Just a man spiraling into oblivion and dragging everyone down with him. That man is Rikio Ishikawa (Tetsuya Watari), who has the energy of someone who has no interest in surviving the next scene. Ishikawa isn’t an antihero; he’s a walking death wish. The film opens with him saving a boss during a knife fight, and from that moment, his rise begins—but it’s not the rise of ambition. It’s the rise of someone who thrives on chaos.
He kills without hesitation, bites the hand that feeds him, and burns every bridge until there’s nothing left but ashes and debt collectors. What makes the film brutal isn’t just the body count, it’s the inevitability. You know where Ishikawa is heading from the start. The question isn’t if he’ll fall—it’s how far he’ll drag the world with him before he hits bottom. By the time heroin enters the picture, the movie turns into a full descent. Ishikawa becomes a ghost of himself, a man who only knows destruction because it’s the only language he speaks. There’s no redemption, no catharsis, no noble death. Just the truth Fukasaku believed about the post-war underworld: it eats its own.
47. Footprints on the Moon
Footprints on the Moon is a giallo for people who hate giallo, which is why it’s one of the only ones I like. It skips the usual bloodbath and goes straight for the brain. It’s not about masked killers and black gloves. It’s about a woman trying to figure out if she’s losing her mind, and Luigi Bazzoni makes you feel every second of that confusion. He was the first director to realize that the dream logic that’s prevalent throughout the genre works better if the plot lends itself to dream logic and isn’t just thrown in to help contribute to the eerie atmosphere. Florinda Bolkan plays Alice, a translator who wakes up to find three days missing from her life. She has no idea where she was, what she did, or why her dreams are haunted by a bizarre image of astronauts abandoning a man on the moon. If that sounds strange, good—that’s the point. From the start, nothing feels stable.
Clocks don’t match, people remember her differently, and reality keeps sliding out of reach. This is a slow burn, and Bazzoni leans into the atmosphere hard. Every location looks perfect but feels off and every conversation raises more questions than it answers. The pacing is deliberate, but the mood keeps you hooked. You want answers as much as Alice does, and Bazzoni keeps dangling them just out of reach. The payoff isn’t about shocking twists or gore. It’s about that creeping sense of inevitability—the feeling that something has been wrong since the first frame, and now you finally know what it is. By the end, you’re not sure if you’ve watched a mystery, a dream, or a nightmare. Footprints on the Moon is elegant, creepy, and one of the most unique psychological gialli of the 1970s.
46. Infra-Man
On the surface, Infra-Man (also known as The Super Infra-Man and Chinese Superman) is a children’s adventure movie: brightly colored, full of monsters, explosions, and a hero in a red-and-silver suit who never doubts his mission for a second. But beneath the comic book spectacle lies something more fascinating—a look into the global influence of pop culture during the 1970s and the ways in which Hong Kong cinema could adapt, absorb, and reinvent an idea until it became its own. The film looked into the future of superhero cinema and predicted it would all look like this. You can see the fingerprints of this in everything from Power Rangers to anime but even the best imitators failed to capture the earnestness of the film’s production. The low budget and cheap effects are a perk, not a bug. It understands the appeal of a certain level of camp to be effective, which also applies to the story.
The premise is simple enough. The Earth is threatened by Demon Princess Elzebub and her army of mutant creatures, and only one man (rebuilt as the bionic superhero Infra-Man) can stop them. It is not a story that requires much elaboration, and the movie wisely doesn’t linger on exposition. Instead, it plunges into a series of battles that are more exuberant than convincing, choreographed with the same energy Shaw Brothers once reserved for their kung fu epics. Infra-Man is not a great film, but it is a great example of what movies can do when they embrace the fantastic without hesitation. It is fast, loud, and utterly committed to the vision of a world where monsters roam and heroes rise to meet them. Sometimes, that’s enough.
45. Welcome Home, Brother Charles
Most films within the blaxploitation genre go through the same general plot machinations, with very little change. Sometimes the main character is a detective, sometimes they’re a pimp, sometimes they’re looking for revenge, but almost all of them have the same basic arc. And then there are films like Sugar Hill, which injected it with voodoo horror. Films like Top of the Heap, which have surreal sequences where the main character daydreams about being an astronaut. And films like Welcome Home Brother Charles, which is one of the most unforgettable revenge stories ever told.
The story begins with Charles, a small-time hustler who becomes the target of a corrupt cop determined to make an example out of him. After a brutal and humiliating stint in prison, Charles is released, changed in more ways than one. The narrative framework is familiar: a man seeking justice after being broken by a system designed to crush him. But then the film takes a turn so unexpected that it has lived on in infamy—a twist involving Charles’ anatomy that is less about realism than about turning the ultimate symbol of Black masculinity into a weapon.
If a French movie had this exact premise and was a bit more “sophisticated” in its presentation, it would definitely win the Palme d’Or in whatever year it came out. Is it a good film? That depends on the definition. As a piece of storytelling, it’s uneven. As a piece of social commentary, it’s both blunt and strangely brilliant, using absurdity to underline the absurdity of systemic racism. And as an experience, it’s unforgettable. You may laugh, you may cringe, but you won’t forget it, and in the world of cinema, that counts for something.
44. The Valiant Ones
King Hu’s films are often compared to Westerns or even to Kurosawa, but I think that misses the essence of what he’s doing. He made martial arts films that didn’t move like other martial arts films. They breathe, they wander, they pause to listen to the wind. He is less concerned with character psychology than with the interplay of time, space, and motion. Watching The Valiant Ones, you don’t just follow a story—you follow a rhythm. They are almost ballet in their design and construction. The film is about military strategy and betrayal set in the Ming Dynasty, but what it’s about isn’t as interesting as how it’s presented. Every frame is designed like a painting. Every fight scene is less a brawl and more a beautifully choreographed dance that ends with most of the dancers dying.
The Valiant Ones has a story structure you’ve seen a million times: The Ming court enlists a band of warriors to eliminate a group of Japanese pirates terrorizing the coast. It is, in theory, a patriotic tale of unity and loyalty (it was made to comment on anti-Japanese sentiment at the time). But Hu complicates it. It’s with far more betrayals and double crosses. The plot is admittedly a bit too obtuse for its own good, but Hu’s direction more than makes up for it. He stages fights in open landscapes, against the wind-whipped coast, inside rooms framed by latticed windows. The camera is almost always moving with a grace that makes you aware of the choreography. The Valiant Ones is a work of art that you can find being periodically screened at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive as part of its film exhibits.
43. Report to the Commissioner
Michael Moriarty is one of those actors that directors just didn’t know what to do with. He has a weird energy that only Larry Cohen seemed to click with. Their work together should’ve opened up all the doors his work on this film didn’t because people at least saw those movies. Report to the Commissioner is easily the most obscure movie on this list, but it’s also one of the best, and if more critics and audiences had seen it at the time, it could’ve turned Moriarty into one of the busiest character actors of the era. The film opens like a procedural: A rookie detective named Bo Lockley (Michael Moriarty) is sent to find a missing woman. He’s inexperienced, earnest, and slightly out of his depth in a New York City that seems to radiate hostility from every brick.
What he doesn’t know (and what we learn slowly) is that the woman he’s looking for is an undercover cop. What begins as a simple assignment spirals into tragedy. Lockley’s search leads him into a cramped apartment, a hostage situation, and a long, tense standoff that dominates the second half of the film. By the time the credits roll, you realize the real villain isn’t the junkie in the room or even the criminals running the streets—it’s the bureaucracy above them, making decisions that feel as random as they are cruel. By the end, Report to the Commissioner doesn’t deliver the catharsis most cop dramas promise. This isn’t the slick, mythic New York of Serpico or the operatic violence of The French Connection. It’s a film that leaves you with the bitter taste of inevitability. You don’t feel like you’ve seen a victory or even a defeat—you feel like you’ve watched a mistake spiral into something permanent.
42. The Suspicious Death of a Minor
This film has some of the elements of a giallo – sleezy, sex-related crimes, a distinctive murderer (with mirrored sunglasses) – but it’s really a crime thriller, a poliziotteschi film. It’s got more in common with American films like Dirty Harry than it does with other films director Sergio Martino is known for, like The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh or Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key. It’s excellent genre fun, though, and a film that often gets overlooked in favor of Martino’s other efforts. While some elements don’t work – a slapstick car chase seems out of place after the murder of an underage girl, for instance – the likability of the main character (played by the always enjoyable Claudio Cassinelli) keeps you interested and entertained. There are some great action sequences and visuals, and a typical ’70s soundtrack. While the film has been passed over as a minor giallo, not up to the quality of the director’s earlier works, it’s actually an entertaining crime/action film with some giallo elements and deserves a second look.
–Bob Cram
41. Seven Beauties
I don’t believe it’s necessary for you to like the main character of a movie in order to like a movie, but few films test that as hard as Seven Beauties. Pasqualino (Giancarlo Giannini) is not a likable man. He is selfish, vain, and cowardly, but he is also human. The central figure of the film, Pasqualino, is a small-time hood from Naples who believes himself to be a man of great pride and cunning. In reality, he’s a fool, a clown whose self-image is his undoing. When he kills a man for dishonoring his sister and tries to cover it up, his life spins out of control. He flees, joins the army, deserts, and is captured by the Germans.
The film takes us from Naples to the bleak landscape of a concentration camp, and by the end, Pasqualino has done things he never imagined he could do, simply to live another day. The film moves between black comedy and horror with disorienting ease. One moment we’re laughing at Pasqualino’s preening bravado, the next we’re staring at the hollow eyes of prisoners marching to their deaths. This tonal instability is not a flaw—it’s the point. In war, absurdity and atrocity live side by side. Wertmüller refuses to let us settle into one emotion because the reality she depicts never allowed for it. She also refuses to give us the moral clarity we expect.
We keep waiting for Pasqualino to eventually triumph over his circumstances or, at the very least, grow as a human being, but the opposite happens. He doesn’t dig in; he erodes. But there’s no catharsis to his comeuppance. He’s a bad man who bad things happen to, and while he deserves some of it, the shit piles on so high, it’s impossible not to feel somewhat empathetic. Seven Beauties was the first film directed by a woman to be nominated for the Best Director Oscar, and watching it today, it still feels audacious. It challenges us, provokes us, and denies us the comfort of easy judgments. It asks a question no one wants to answer: How far would you go to stay alive?
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What are some of your favorite movies from 1975? Do you think they’ll show up on this list?
