What Was the Best Year for Movies?
In the history of film, some years have stood out as being especially great for movies. Those years saw an abundance of gems for film lovers, from epic blockbusters to sleeper hits to independent projects that have stood the test of time. Below is a list of six of the best years for film and the movies that made them great.
1939
In 1939 Hollywood’s studio system was at its peak, with the release of two big-budget movies—Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz—that became all-time classics despite their troubled productions. Both films credit Victor Fleming as director, but King Vidor also had a hand in The Wizard of Oz, and George Cukor and Sam Wood directed parts of Gone with the Wind. Frank Capra’s populist drama Mr. Smith Goes to Washington featured Jimmy Stewart in one of his finest performances. John Ford’s western Stagecoach made a star of John Wayne.
Many of that year’s pictures featured unforgettable performances by women, in particular Vivien Leigh (as Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind), Judy Garland (as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz), Bette Davis in the weeper Dark Victory (directed by Edmund Goulding), and Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, Norma Shearer, Joan Fontaine, and Paulette Goddard in Cukor’s ensemble comedy The Women. Other standouts of 1939 include Howard Hawks’s Only Angels Have Wings (starring Cary Grant, Jean Arthur, and Rita Hayworth), Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln (starring Henry Fonda), and William Wyler’s Wuthering Heights (starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon).
1967
By the mid-1960s the studio system was on its last legs. In 1967 Arthur Penn’s violent true crime drama Bonnie and Clyde announced a revolution in filmmaking. New Hollywood, as the revolution was called, had arrived. Starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway as the titular outlaw lovers (and featuring Gene Hackman, Estelle Parsons, and Michael J. Pollard in solid supporting roles), Bonnie and Clyde was a surprise box-office hit. The Graduate, directed by Mike Nichols and starring Dustin Hoffman, Katharine Ross, and Anne Bancroft, was another groundbreaking film for its portrayal of postgraduate malaise and the alienation of the baby boom generation then coming of age.
Paul Newman offered another memorable antihero in Stuart Rosenberg’s Cool Hand Luke, as did Lee Marvin as a military officer leading convicted soldiers on a suicidal mission in Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen. Race relations were the subject of Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night and Stanley Kramer’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Both films starred Sidney Poitier, who was also the leading man in that year’s To Sir, with Love (directed by the British novelist and screenwriter James Clavell). In Terence Young’s thriller Wait Until Dark and Luis Buñuel’s evocative Belle de Jour, Audrey Hepburn and Catherine Deneuve, respectively, had career-changing roles.
1975
The 1970s has been called the greatest decade in the history of film, but 1975 stands out as the year that introduced the first summer blockbuster. Released that June, Jaws smashed box-office records and heralded Steven Spielberg as a major cinematic storyteller. Jaws also introduced new movie marketing strategies, such as television advertising and widespread distribution in hundreds of theaters on a film’s opening weekend.
Other noteworthy films of 1975 included Stanley Kubrick’s meticulous period drama Barry Lyndon, Ken Russell’s rock opera Tommy, and Robert Altman’s Nashville, a sprawling social commentary centering on the country music milieu. Chantal Akerman’s avant-garde classic Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles has been called one of the greatest movies of all time, and the Maysles brothers’ documentary Grey Gardens is considered one of the most fascinating examples of cinéma vérité. Jack Nicholson, Gene Hackman, and Al Pacino turned in electrifying performances in, respectively, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Night Moves, and Dog Day Afternoon. Also notable: the coming-of-age film Cooley High, the cult comedy Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and the ultimate midnight movie The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
1994
In 1994 the independent film came out swinging, yet the year also produced many acclaimed big-budget classics. Quentin Tarantino’s neo-noir Pulp Fiction pointed filmmakers in a new direction of nonlinear plots, quirky casting, and vibrant screenwriting. Robert Zemeckis’s Forrest Gump, with Tom Hanks in the title role, featured groundbreaking computer-generated images (CGI) and a heavy dose of nostalgia.
The year also saw the release of the Disney blockbuster The Lion King, Frank Darabont’s gripping prison drama The Shawshank Redemption (starring Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins), the British romantic comedy Four Weddings and a Funeral, Oliver Stone’s controversial crime-spree road movie Natural Born Killers, and Tim Burton’s reliably eccentric Ed Wood. Indie director Kevin Smith debuted with Clerks, and action films were represented by Speed (starring Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock) and True Lies (starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis). Jim Carrey was anointed the year’s king of comedy with Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and The Mask, the latter of which also featured Cameron Diaz in one of her first roles.
1999
The 1990s closed out with a film that became the standard against which all cinematic CGI would be measured: Lilly and Lana Wachowski’s science-fiction smash The Matrix. Innovative filmmaking was also represented in Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s indie sleeper The Blair Witch Project and Spike Jonze’s postmodern satire on celebrity culture Being John Malkovich. Sofia Coppola debuted with The Virgin Suicides, and Sam Mendes picked up Oscars for best director and best picture with American Beauty. Spike Lee turned his lens on the “Son of Sam” serial killings in New York City in the 1970s with Summer of Sam.
(Play Britannica’s Female Directors Bingo.)
Other standouts of 1999 included M. Night Shyamalan’s chilling The Sixth Sense, David Fincher’s Gen X magnum opus Fight Club, Frank Darabont’s haunting fantasy drama The Green Mile, Alexander Payne’s wicked high-school satire Election, Paul Thomas Anderson’s gut-wrenching Magnolia, Anthony Minghella’s glamorous psychological thriller The Talented Mr. Ripley, and David O. Russell’s Gulf War dark comedy Three Kings. Among the year’s classic comedies were Frank Oz’s Bowfinger, in which Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy teamed up (at long last!) to skewer the Hollywood dream factory, and Mike Judge’s Office Space, which elicited knowing chuckles from miserable cubicle jockeys everywhere.
2007
In 2007 the Coen brothers mashed up the western and neo-noir genres to produce No Country for Old Men, a relentlessly bleak story of a sociopath (played by Javier Bardem) in the Southwest. Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood also revisited classic tropes of the Old West and nurtured explosive performances by Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Dano. Comedy favorites included the Judd Apatow-produced films Superbad and Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, as well as Juno (with Elliot Page in a star-making role) and the animated The Simpsons Movie. Pixar released the acclaimed Ratatouille, and Disney subverted the Cinderella story in Enchanted.
Other gems of 2007 included the musicals Across the Universe, directed by Julie Taymor, and Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. The year also offered strong dramas in Sean Penn’s Into the Wild, Joe Wright’s Atonement (adapted from the Ian McEwan novel), Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton (starring George Clooney and Tilda Swinton), Ridley Scott’s American Gangster (starring Denzel Washington), and Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (starring Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck).
Other great years for movies
This list is by no means exhaustive. Other years that have been named as the greatest year for movies include 1946, 1955, 1959, 1968, 1976, 1977, 1982, 2001, 2010, 2012, and 2022.
What do you think was the best year for movies?