The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

50. 1976 - Network

Network
United Artists

Honourable Mentions: All the President's Men, Rocky, Taxi Driver

1976 is another one of those years that confidently makes the case for the seventies being the greatest cinematic decade, with not just the aforementioned honourable mentions to contend with, but also the likes of John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13, Richard Donner's The Omen, and Brian De Palma's Carrie, among several other formidable examples.

Of all the films of that year, though, one persists as a timelessly prescient and immaculately performed piece that goes beyond just capturing the zeitgeist, and that is Sidney Lumet's Network.

Written by Paddy Chayefsky and starring William Holden, Faye Dunaway, Peter Finch, and Robert Duvall, Network is as much a brilliant ensemble drama as it is a blistering satire of broadcast journalism and the corrosive effects of seventies rot. Chayefsky's dialogue is razor sharp, while the cast - comprised of old and new Hollywood players - renders that sense of generational shift and moral existentialism in stark clarity.

 
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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.