Best cinema of the last 50 years

When we live through tumultuous times, we sometimes lose sight of the old adage that history repeats itself. Fifty years ago, the world may not have had Donald Trump, the war in Ukraine, the attacks on Gaza or the economic rollercoaster that the first few months of 2025 have already delivered, but there were plenty of momentous things going on.

Angola gained its independence from Portugal; Keith Jarrett sat down to play the legendary Köln Concert; Margaret Thatcher became the first female leader of a political party in UK history when she took over the Conservative Party from Ted Heath; Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft; the Khmer Rouge began its reign of terror and bloodshed in Cambodia; West Ham United won the FA Cup and Rembrandt’s famous The Night Watch was slashed multiple times by a mentally unstable school teacher at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

In cinemas globally it was a good time for the movies. The American New Wave was still holding strong even as the release of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws signalled the end of the independent movement and a move towards blockbuster big-screen spectacle that would transform the movie-going experience from the 1980s. Stanley Kubrick released Barry Lyndon; Robert Redford starred in the great paranoid thriller 3 Days in the Condor; Warren Beatty brought his ‘70s shag and toothy smile to the political comedy Shampoo and Jack Nicholson shot to superstardom as McMurphy, the leader of the pack of loveable mad men in Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Here in celebration of the half-century of a bygone excellent all-round year in movie history are three smaller but hugely influential films from a year in which cineastes were spoiled for choice and everyone who mattered seemed to be on top of their game.

THE ART-HOUSE ESSENTIAL:

Mirror  (YouTube)

Russian master Andrei Tarkovsky made one of his most personal, ethereal and hauntingly beautiful films with Mirror, a free-form meditation on life and art that incorporates material from a wide variety of sources.

The film is loosely made up of reflections of its unseen protagonist Alexei, a 40-year-old Soviet poet who recalls moments from his childhood, adolescence and present in a style that incorporates black and white and colour. This leaves the audiences with an effective impression of life fragments that are similar to a musical composition than a traditional linear narrative film.

Tarkovsky had the original idea for the film a decade before but it wasn’t until 1973 that the Soviet cultural bureaucrats greenlit the project. Upon its release it bitterly divided audiences, critics and the USSR’s film establishment but over the last half-decade it’s earned its deserved place as one of cinema’s most singular and unforgettable experiences. It landed on every greatest films of all time list and won the hearts of Russian viewers, many of whom consider it Tarkovsky’s greatest achievement.

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THE STONE-COLD CLASSIC:

Dersu Uzala (YouTube)

Japanese legend Akira Kurosawa went to the tundra of Russia for this, his only non-Japanese language film based on a 1923 memoir by explorer Vladimir Arsenyev.

Kurosawa’s focus is on the native inhabitants of the remote region of Sikhote-Alin who have created for themselves a life that’s in harmony with their natural environment, fortified by centuries of tradition and practices learned from patient observation, trial and error. Their encounters with an explorer from early 20th century “civilised” society will see them touch the hearts of their sophisticated visitors while also having to realise that it marks an end to their way of life as civilisation and industrial society will soon arrive.

It also marked a return to form and offered a new lease on life for Kurosawa who, following the critical and commercial failure of a previous film, Dodes’ka-den, in 1971 had attempted suicide.

Seeing the chance to bring to life a story he had been fascinated with for decades, Kurosawa poured his heart and soul in to Dersu Uzala, earning critical acclaim and the Oscar for Best Foreign Film for his efforts.

Though not held in the same regard as some of Kurosawa’s more famous and celebrated works, Dersu Uzala has stood the test of time as a beautiful film and one that emphasizes a set of values that still resonate 50 years later.

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THE DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH:

The Passenger (YouTube)

Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni took his own existential view on the dramatic thriller genre with this archetypal disillusioned ’70s film starring Jack Nicholson as jaded journalist David Locke. When Locke finds a dead businessman in his hotel in Chad, he assumes the dead man’s identity and discovers that he’s now embroiled in the murky world of international arms smuggling.

Co-starring Maria Schneider and magnificently shot by cinematographer Luciano Tovoli, the film is a slow-boiling, psychologically unnerving study of ennui, dread and the increasingly pervasive sense of failed idealism that permeated the 1970s in the wake of the ’60s generation’s hopes of freedom, free love and free minds. Its next to last long-take tracking shot has become legendary — a standout moment in a film that makes provocative hay out of its conventional story to head-scratching and memorable effect.

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