The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

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.