The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025
50. 1976 - Network
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.