3. The Conversation (1974)
The Conversation was the movie that Francis Ford Coppola decided to make after The Godfather, a tense, paranoid thriller about a man named Harry Caul (played impeccably by Gene Hackman) who works as a surveillance expert. After recording a conversation one day, Caul becomes convinced that something terrible is going to happen. In true Coppola style, The Conversation is brilliantly constructed, gripping, and delicately layered, but the movie drives towards an ending that ultimately seals the deal and makes it truly great in its final moments. That's to say, at the end of The Conversation, Caul realises that - having deluded himself into thinking that an unfaithful wife and her boyfriend were going to be murdered by her husband - everything he believes is wrong, and that it was in fact the other way round: the cheat and her boyfriend planned to murder the husband. In the final, heartbreaking scene, Caul tears down his apartment, looking for bugs, after receiving a call warning him to remain uninvolved. Lonely and lost, Caul sits down and plays the only thing left undamaged in his apartment - his saxophone.