The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

49. 1977 - Sorcerer

Sorcerer 1977
Universal Pictures / Paramount Pictures

Honourable Mentions: Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Wars, Suspiria

A remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1953 classic The Wages of Fear, William Friedkin's Sorcerer has the unfortunate honour of being one of the greatest films ever made, but one that took years to find its audience. (We in the biz call that the "John Carpenter special".)

The reasons for Sorcerer's contemporary failure can be attributed to its vague (but great) title and being released in the tsunami generated by George Lucas' Star Wars, but that has little bearing on its reputation today, where it's rightly considered one of Friedkin's best - a frantic, stress-induced whirlwind of a picture whose energy reflects its own arduous production, anchored by the ineffable Roy Scheider, with whom Friedkin had previously collaborated on The French Connection.

The film itself revolves around a quartet of rogues who find themselves stranded in a Latin American purgatory, with the only route out being to transport boxes of leaking, combustible nitroglycerin through the jungle to collapse a burning oil derrick run by an unscrupulous petro company. It's man pitted against himself and the elements, and the results are dizzying.

 
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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.