What's your favorite movie of 1972? My top ten goes like so...
01 Cabaret (Bob Fosse)
Come to the cabaret 🎵
02 The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola)
Everyone's favorite thing ever. Well, except mine. It's great, sure, but I have an ingrained deep resistance to the mass mainstream fetishizing / glamorization of organized crime. And Cabaret would be in my all time top ten were I to make one, so this has to take runner-up position.
03 What's Up Doc? (Peter Bogdanovich)
Babs in comedies 4ever - we lost so much when she got self serious by the early-80s.
So exciting to think about / write about.
05 Deliverance (John Boorman)
Burt Reynold's rubber vest is everything.
06 The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Luis Buñuel)
Due for a revisit
07 Agguire the Wrath of God (Werner Herzog)
I know I was too young for this when I first saw it so need to reevaluate. The monkeys and the raft sure were memorable. Insane Klaus Kinski sure was inimitable.
08 Female Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41 (Shun'ya Itô)
Was this a Tarantino obsession? There was some reason why I saw it that I now can't remember but it's quite a trip.
09 Frenzy (Alfred Hitchcock)
Not fully in love with this one but there are definitely masterful beats. At any rate Hitchcock's penultimate film is far superior to his uneven final effort Family Plot (1976). There's a really interesting chapter of the fascinating Psycho-inspired novel "What You See in the Dark" that alludes to Frenzy a bit. (Full disclosure: The author Manuel Muñoz is a friend but his incredible writing has won tons of awards so you don't even have to take our word for it that you should read his stuff!)
10 ...and I'm leaving a spot open because honestly I have plenty left to see from that year like The Candidate, Sounder and Sleuth. You?