From Rocky to Taxi Driver, some of the greatest American movies ever made are celebrating their 50th anniversary in 2026. The 1970s were arguably the greatest decade for American cinema, so the 2020s have been jam-packed with 50th-anniversary screenings for masterpieces like Jaws, The Godfather, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
1976 was an incredible year for movies, so 2026 will see some true classics celebrating their 50th birthday. John Wayne’s final western, Mel Brooks’ silent comedy, and Sidney Lumet’s timeless satire of the media are all turning 50 this year.
The Shootist
John Wayne made his final film appearance in 1976, with a starring role in Don Siegel’s western The Shootist. It ended up being the perfect swansong for Wayne’s legendary, decades-long western career. Its story of a dying gunslinger reckoning with his mortality is poetically aligned with the metatextual narrative of an aging movie cowboy going out for one last rodeo.
Silent Movie
Silent Movie might not be as celebrated as Mel Brooks’ more famous movies, like Blazing Saddles or Young Frankenstein, but it’s just as funny. It’s a spot-on spoof of the tropes and techniques of silent comedies, but it’s also a sharp satire of the film industry. This silent film from the 1970s tells the story of a movie producer trying to get a studio to fund a silent film in 1970s Hollywood.
The Enforcer
The third entry in Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry series, The Enforcer, might be the best of the sequels — it’s certainly the most influential. The Enforcer’s story of Harry Callahan taking a young rookie under his wing would go on to inspire Dredd, one of the greatest comic book movies ever made.
The Enforcer does a better job of balancing its action and humor than any of the other Dirty Harry movies (even the first one). Eastwood’s dynamic with Tyne Daly is endlessly watchable; she’s a perfect foil for Harry.
Mikey And Nicky
After helming two acclaimed romantic comedies, Elaine May tried her hand at something very different: a straightforward crime drama. Mikey and Nicky is a character-driven two-hander starring John Cassavetes as Nicky, a small-time crook whose mobster boss has put a price on his head, and Peter Falk as Mikey, the childhood friend he calls on for help.
Mikey and Nicky follows its title characters over the course of this hectic night. As Mikey helps Nicky plan his escape, they reflect on their fond childhood memories. It doesn’t feel like a gangster movie; it’s more of a sobering relationship drama about two platonic male friends hashing it out, like Diner or Superbad.
All The President’s Men
In the mid-1970s, when the Watergate scandal broke the American people’s trust in their government, Hollywood pumped out a wave of paranoid political thrillers about government conspiracies and shady cover-ups. The definitive movie of this era is, of course, the one about Watergate itself.
All the President’s Men stars Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the two Washington Post reporters who broke the story and effectively brought down the Nixon administration. The movie is an ode to the power of good journalism, and the importance of exposing the truth, which we could really use right about now.
The Bad News Bears
The original Bad News Bears might not be the finest sports movie ever made, but it might be the funniest. Walter Matthau stars as Morris Buttermaker, an alcoholic ex-pitcher who reluctantly takes a coaching position in a fledgling youth baseball team called the Bears.
What made The Bad News Bears feel different was that the kids’ foul-mouthed dialogue reflected how kids actually talk (just like South Park would do two decades later). The Bad News Bears still holds up today, because audiences still love rooting for the underdog, and the Bears are the ultimate underdogs.
Network
50 years later, Sidney Lumet and Paddy Chayefsky’s satirical drama Network feels hauntingly prescient. Its tale of a TV network exploiting an anchorman’s mental illness for ratings is the perfect encapsulation of the corruptibility of mass media, and its message is just as relevant to today’s TikTok climate as it was to the broadcast television industry of the 1970s.
Chayefsky’s screenplay and Lumet’s direction of it masterfully balance the tone. They assembled one of the greatest ensembles in film history to bring their complex, three-dimensional characters to life: Peter Finch as the unhinged anchorman, Faye Dunaway as the high-strung programming chief with radical ideas, William Holden as the hopeless romantic who gets seduced and abandoned.
Carrie
Brian De Palma’s Carrie is the original Stephen King adaptation. The 50-year legacy of King adaptations, from The Shining to Misery to The Shawshank Redemption to the recent dystopian masterpiece The Long Walk, can be traced back to the 1976 movie based on King’s debut novel.
Although Hollywood has re-adapted the book a few times over the years (including an upcoming miniseries by Mike Flanagan), De Palma’s Carrie remains the quintessential on-screen telling of this story. Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie give Oscar-worthy performances in the lead roles, and De Palma brings the appropriate hair-raising atmosphere to key sequences like the shower menstruation and the prom-night bloodening. It’s a near-perfect movie.
Rocky
As a struggling young actor, Sylvester Stallone wasn’t being offered the leading roles he wanted, so he wrote a starring vehicle for himself — and it became one of the most iconic movies ever made. It launched Stallone to superstardom overnight and made him just the third writer-actor after Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles to be Oscar-nominated for both Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay.
Rocky pioneered the now-overdone underdog sports movie formula, and it remains a shining example of why that formula works so well. Rocky isn’t really about boxing; it’s a love story. Ultimately, Rocky doesn’t win the fight he spent the whole movie training for, but he doesn’t care about that as long as he has Adrian in his corner.
Taxi Driver
The greatest movie celebrating its 50th anniversary this year is Martin Scorsese’s seminal neo-noir Taxi Driver. At a time when movies like Coffy and Death Wish were turning vigilantes into folk heroes, Taxi Driver presented the grim reality of street justice through the psychosis of an insomniac Vietnam War veteran and the crime-ridden cesspool of ‘70s-era New York.
Taxi Driver is one of the only American films that can compete with the profundity and subtlety and visual poetry of world-cinema classics like 8½ and Tokyo Story. Robert De Niro crafted the perfect antihero with his portrayal of disturbed killer Travis Bickle. Travis has good intentions, but his worldview is so warped and twisted that those good intentions yield reprehensible actions.
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