New Bracket Challenge: Greatest American Film Of The 1970s

We begin our new bracket challenge in a quest to crown the greatest American film of the 1970s.

Well my friends, it is time once again for another bracket challenge. This time around, we’ll be tackling the title of Greatest American Film of the 1970s. The Seventies were a vaunted period in American cinema. The decade fully welcomed in the denizens of the new Hollywood like Spielberg, Coppola, Lucas, Ashby and others. Themes and subjects that had once been anathema were now being tackled head-on by mainstream cinema. America was in the midst of a colossal change and Hollywood was there to both lead the way and to capture the shift as it happened.

The decade is chock full of iconic performances, brilliant direction, and remarkable storytelling. However, there is an issue that needs to be addressed at the top. There are thirty two films in this list all directed by men, and these are films told almost exclusively from a male point of view. This is both an example of the misogyny rampant in Hollywood and a reminder that looking at film from a given period can provide us with only a n…