81%  Winner:   Rocky  120 min,  PG,  [Drama, Sport]  [John G. Avildsen]  [03 Dec 1976]
Ratings & Reviews:  IMDb Reviews: 81%,   Rotten Tomatoes: 93%,   Metacritic: 70%,   External Reviews
Awards:  Won 3 Oscars. Another 17 wins & 21 nominations.
Actors:  Burt Young, Carl Weathers, Sylvester Stallone, Talia Shire
Writer:  Sylvester Stallone
External Links:  Wikipedia  Rotten Tomatoes  IMDb  Website     Language:  English    Country:  USA
Plot:  Rocky Balboa is a struggling boxer trying to make the big time, working as a debt collector for a pittance. When heavyweight champion Apollo Creed visits Philadelphia, his managers want to set up an exhibition match between Creed and a struggling boxer, touting the fight as a chance for a "nobody" to become a "somebody". The match is supposed to be easily won by Creed, but someone forgot to tell Rocky, who sees this as his only shot at the big time.
Rotten Tomatoes:   A slightly dimwitted amateur boxer from Philadelphia's tough neighborhood gets a surprise shot at fighting for the heavyweight championship, while at the same time he finds love in the arms of a shy, reclusive girl who works in the local pet store.

84%  Nominee:   All the President's Men  138 min,  PG,  [Biography, Drama, History, Thriller]  [Alan J. Pakula]  [09 Apr 1976]
Ratings & Reviews:  IMDb Reviews: 80%,   Rotten Tomatoes: 93%,   Metacritic: 80%,   External Reviews
Awards:  Won 4 Oscars. Another 13 wins & 21 nominations.
Actors:  Dustin Hoffman, Jack Warden, Martin Balsam, Robert Redford
Writer:  Carl Bernstein (book), Bob Woodward (book), William Goldman (screenplay)
External Links:  Wikipedia  Rotten Tomatoes  IMDb     Language:  English, Spanish    Country:  USA
Plot:  In the run-up to the 1972 elections, Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward covers what seems to be a minor break-in at the Democratic Party National headquarters. He is surprised to find top lawyers already on the defense case, and the discovery of names and addresses of Republican fund organizers on the accused further arouses his suspicions. The editor of the Post is prepared to run with the story and assigns Woodward and Carl Bernstein to it. They find the trail leading higher and higher in the Republican Party, and eventually into the White House itself.
Rotten Tomatoes:   A reconstruction of the discovery of the White House link with the Watergate affair by two young reporters from the Washington Post.

76%  Nominee:   Bound for Glory  147 min,  PG,  [Biography, Drama, Music]  [Hal Ashby]  [05 Dec 1976]
Ratings & Reviews:  IMDb Reviews: 73%,   Rotten Tomatoes: 85%,   Metacritic: 70%,   External Reviews
Awards:  Won 2 Oscars. Another 4 wins & 11 nominations.
Actors:  David Carradine, Gail Strickland, Melinda Dillon, Ronny Cox
Writer:  Robert Getchell (screenplay), Woody Guthrie (autobiography)
External Links:  Wikipedia  Rotten Tomatoes  IMDb     Language:  English    Country:  USA
Plot:  This film is an excellent biography of Woody Guthrie, one of America's greatest folk singers. He left his dust-devastated Texas home in the 1930s to find work, and discovered the suffering and strength of America's working class.
Rotten Tomatoes:   Based on the autobiography of iconic folk singer Woody Guthrie, who wrote "This Land Is Your Land." Unable to find work in Texas after the Dust Bowl devastation of the 1930s, Guthrie left his family with relatives rode the rails with thousands of men, traveling to migrant worker camps in California, recording the brutality and injustices he witnessed in song. Eventually, Guthrie's protest music earned him a following through the radio and he rode the rails to New York to find a larger audience.

87%  Nominee:   Network  121 min,  R,  [Drama]  [Sidney Lumet]  [27 Nov 1976]
Ratings & Reviews:  IMDb Reviews: 81%,   Rotten Tomatoes: 92%,   Metacritic: 88%,   External Reviews
Awards:  Won 4 Oscars. Another 16 wins & 25 nominations.
Actors:  Faye Dunaway, Peter Finch, Robert Duvall, William Holden
Writer:  Paddy Chayefsky
External Links:  Wikipedia  Rotten Tomatoes  IMDb     Language:  English    Country:  USA
Plot:  In the 1970s, terrorist violence is the stuff of networks' nightly news programming and the corporate structure of the UBS Television Network is changing. Meanwhile, Howard Beale, the aging UBS news anchor, has lost his once strong ratings share and so the network fires him. Beale reacts in an unexpected way. We then see how this affects the fortunes of Beale, his coworkers (Max Schumacher and Diana Christensen), and the network.
Rotten Tomatoes:   When anchorman Howard Beale is forced to retire his 25-year post because of his age, he announces to his viewers that he's going to commit suicide on his final program. When his announcement looks like it will improve the ratings, the entire event is turned into a garish entertainment spectacle.

91%  Nominee:   Taxi Driver  114 min,  R,  [Crime, Drama]  [Martin Scorsese]  [08 Feb 1976]
Ratings & Reviews:  IMDb Reviews: 83%,   Rotten Tomatoes: 98%,   Metacritic: 94%,   External Reviews
Awards:  Nominated for 4 Oscars. Another 21 wins & 15 nominations.
Actors:  Cybill Shepherd, Diahnne Abbott, Frank Adu, Gino Ardito, Jodie Foster, Robert De Niro, Victor Argo
Writer:  Paul Schrader
External Links:  Wikipedia  Rotten Tomatoes  IMDb     Language:  English, Spanish    Country:  USA
Plot:  Travis Bickle is an ex-Marine and Vietnam War veteran living in New York City. As he suffers from insomnia, he spends his time working as a taxi driver at night, watching porn movies at seedy cinemas during the day, or thinking about how the world, New York in particular, has deteriorated into a cesspool. He's a loner who has strong opinions about what is right and wrong with mankind. For him, the one bright spot in New York humanity is Betsy, a worker on the presidential nomination campaign of Senator Charles Palantine. He becomes obsessed with her. After an incident with her, he believes he has to do whatever he needs to make the world a better place in his opinion. One of his priorities is to be the savior for Iris, a twelve-year-old runaway and prostitute who he believes wants out of the profession and under the thumb of her pimp and lover Matthew.
Rotten Tomatoes:   "All the animals come out at night" -- and one of them is a cabby about to snap. In Martin Scorsese's classic 1970s drama, insomniac ex-Marine Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) works the nightshift, driving his cab throughout decaying mid-'70s New York City, wishing for a "real rain" to wash the "scum" off the neon-lit streets. Chronically alone, Travis cannot connect with anyone, not even with such other cabbies as blowhard Wizard (Peter Boyle). He becomes infatuated with vapid blonde presidential campaign worker Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), who agrees to a date and then spurns Travis when he cluelessly takes her to a porno movie. After an encounter with a malevolent fare (played by Scorsese), the increasingly paranoid Travis begins to condition (and arm) himself for his imagined destiny, a mission that mutates from assassinating Betsy's candidate, Charles Palatine (Leonard Harris), to violently "saving" teen hooker Iris (Jodie Foster) from her pimp, Sport (Harvey Keitel). Travis' bloodbath turns him into a media hero; but has it truly calmed his mind? Written by Paul Schrader, Taxi Driver is an homage to and reworking of cinematic influences, a study of individual psychosis, and an acute diagnosis of the latently violent, media-fixated Vietnam era. Scorsese and Schrader structure Travis' mission to save Iris as a film noir version of John Ford's late Western The Searchers (1956), aligning Travis with a mythology of American heroism while exposing that myth's obsessively violent underpinnings. Yet Travis' military record and assassination attempt, as well as Palatine's political platitudes, also ground Taxi Driver in its historical moment of American in the 1970s. Employing such techniques as Godardian jump cuts and ellipses, expressive camera moves and angles, and garish colors, all punctuated by Bernard Herrmann's eerie final score (finished the day he died), Scorsese presents a Manhattan skewed through Travis' point-of-view, where De Niro's now-famous "You talkin' to me" improv becomes one more sign of Travis' madness. Shot during a New York summer heat wave and garbage strike, Taxi Driver got into trouble with the MPAA for its violence. Scorsese desaturated the color in the final shoot-out and got an R, and Taxi Driver surprised its unenthusiastic studio by becoming a box-office hit. Released in the Bicentennial year, after Vietnam, Watergate, and attention-getting attempts on President Ford's life, Taxi Driver's intense portrait of a man and a society unhinged spoke resonantly to the mid-'70s audience -- too resonantly in the case of attempted Reagan assassin and Foster fan John W. Hinckley. Taxi Driver went on to win the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, but it lost the Best Picture Oscar to the more comforting Rocky. Anchored by De Niro's disturbing embodiment of "God's lonely man," Taxi Driver remains a striking milestone of both Scorsese's career and 1970s Hollywood. ~ Lucia Bozzola, Rovi