The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

55. 1971 - Klute

Klute 1971
Warner Bros.

Honourable Mentions: Dirty Harry, The French Connection, A Clockwork Orange

Director Alan J. Pakula's most iconic film from the 1970s was the Watergate thriller All the President's Men. It was also the conclusion of a thematic trilogy the director had forged in the first half of the decade - the "Paranoia Trilogy" - the first two parts of which were 1971's Klute and 1974's The Parallax View.

These films were built around themes of surveillance, corruption, and of course paranoia, capturing the Warren Commission zeitgeist of suspicion and fear with stories that dwelled on surreptitious stalking, assassination and conspiracy. Klute, however, is the most unnerving of the bunch - a neo-noir romance punctuated by pure voyeuristic terror.

Jane Fonda won an Academy Award for her performance as Bree Daniels, with the late, great Donald Sutherland the eponymous PI who crosses her path. Pakula set the tone for the modern thriller with his film, which also boasts perhaps the eeriest score of all time, composed by Michael Small.

 
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WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.