The following 1975 films are, in HE’s view, the most well-liked or highly respected according to the standards of 2025, and not those of 50 years ago. Times change, culture evolves…this is where we are right now.
And I’m a little bit sick of Jaws right now, to be perfectly honest. It’s obviously a very engaging, colorful, well-crafted film in many ways, but it’s stuffed to the gills with annoying or nonsensical Spielberg-isms that simply haven’t aged well.
And Milos Forman‘s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest does not rate all that highly either, and I’m saying this as one who played Dr. Spivey in a community theatre presentation of Ken Kesey‘s classic play that very same year. Plus I met and talked with Kesey at the Sundance Film Festival sometime in the late ’90s so don’t tell me.
Best Films of 1975 according to 2025 criteria (i.e., how often do I pleasurably rewatch?), and more or less in this order (23):
1. Sidney Lumet‘s Dog Day Afternoon.
2. Hal Ashby, Warren Beatty and Robert Towne‘s Shampoo.
3. John Huston‘s The Man Who Would Be King.
4. Sydney Pollack‘s Three Days of the Condor
5. Peter Weir‘s Picnic at Hanging Rock.
6. Michelangelo Antonioni‘s The Passenger.
7. Michael Ritchie‘s Smile.
8. Francois Truffaut‘s The Story of Adele H..
9. Stanley Kubrick‘s Barry Lyndon. (Great film but I’m sick of re-watching it.)
10. Steven Spielberg‘s Jaws.
11. Lina Wertmuller‘s Seven Beauties.
12. Robert Altman‘s Nashville (hate the snide, patronizing attitudes towards Nashville music industry types).
13. Akira Kurosawa‘s Derzu Usala.
14. Joseph Losey‘s The Romantic Englishwoman.
15. Arthur Penn‘s Night Moves.
16. Frank Perry‘s Rancho Deluxe. (“Oh, give me a home, with a low interest loan. A cowgirl and two pickup trucks. A color TV, all the beer should be free. And that, man, is Rancho Deluxe.”
17. Milos Forman‘s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest
18. John Milius‘s The Wind and the Lion.
19. Giuseppe Patroni Griffi‘s The Divine Nymph. (1975’s best hard-on movie.)
20. Walter Hill‘s Hard Times.
21. John Frankenheimer‘s French Connection II.
22. John Schlesinger‘s The Day of the Locust.
23. Thomas McGuane‘s 92 in the Shade.