The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

Honourable Mentions: All That Jazz, Apocalypse Now, The Jerk

What more fitting way to close out what historian Philip Jenkins called the "Decade of Nightmares" than with arguably the best filmic nightmare the seventies conjured? Ridley Scott's Alien is the pinnacle of existential terror - an inversion of the wonder and spectacle that had defined the decade's other iconic sci-fi films (Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind), which peered into the inky void of space and saw not the limitless possibilities of exploration, but instead a dwarfing maw of uncertainty and menace.

It's no surprise that Scott and screenwriter Dan O'Bannon's depiction of a rusting, decaying future dominated by vicious corporations resonated with a seventies audience, but while Alien's political allegory is compelling, its ability to conjure a profound sense of primordial dread - pioneered by the biomechanical stylings of H. R. Giger - is what has led it to endure for so long.

It's rare for a film to confront the viewer with something unseen - an image that is, in effect, totally alien - and yet that's what Scott's production accomplished. It's the perfect lifeform. (And the sequels aren't half-bad either.)