The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

54. 1972 - The Godfather

The Godfather Michael Corleone Al Pacino
Paramount

Honourable Mentions: Cabaret, Deliverance, Pink Flamingos

Often cited alongside Citizen Kane as the greatest movie ever made, Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather redefined the mob genre with a sweeping, sprawling narrative that mirrored America's own loss of innocence. The tragedy of Michael Corleone - a role which catapulted Al Pacino to stardom - was achingly drawn and a key moment in the development of the New Hollywood era, cementing the seventies as a decade of filmmaking freedom and gritty introspection.

Coppola would come to epitomise both the filmmaking highs and anxieties of the movement, following The Godfather with a sequel, The Godfather Part II; the Gene Hackman-starring surveillance thriller The Conversation that same year; and 1979's Apocalypse Now, whose painstaking and chaotic production became the stuff of Hollywood legend.

 
Posted On: 
Content Producer/Presenter

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.