10 great films set in 1970s America

During Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm (1997), 14-year-old Wendy (Christina Ricci) watches with attentive but cynical eyes as a Watergate-snared President Nixon spins and deflects on television, all while her parents argue in the background. It’s a concise and expressive example of the power of American films that look back to the 1970s – children scrutinising culture and media for answers they may not get until they’re older, while adults buckle under the strain of keeping up appearances of their happy, well-to-do family.

Now returning to UK cinemas, Ang Lee’s second English language drama is a muted but barbed drama, refuting the myth that the American nuclear family was ever intact and sane. It depicts a 1970s when ongoing political strife became more difficult to turn into dinner party smalltalk; West Coast sexual experimentation became an insincere way to escape the agony of failed relationships; and ineffective parents struggled to connect with their hardened adolescent kids.

Lee’s incisive, probing approach is just one way that filmmakers have revived the social upheaval of the decade. Since the 1970s ended, directors have deployed both nostalgia and cynicism to unpack an era characterised by disillusionment. But they all make sure to whisk us through the confused fashion and exquisite music, no matter how garish or drab their period piece is in tone. 

The 1990s, in particular, saw an explosion of 70s-reflective dramas, laying the groundwork for the many genre pastiches and adaptations of canonised novels that have followed this century. To mark the return of The Ice Storm, here are 10 films that take us back in time to this tumultuous decade.

Director: Brian De Palma

A quiet contender for Brian De Palma’s finest film, this tragic saga of reformed criminal Carlito (Al Pacino, 10 years on from his turn in De Palma’s Scarface) paints a vivid picture of mid-70s New York. Intent on going straight with a stake in a nightclub, Carlito never fully extricates himself from the drug deals and attempted hits that defined his old life. As much as he refuses to get involved, his proximity to crime and corruption feels increasingly like he’s being taunted by fate. 

After the excesses of the Reagan-era Scarface, a mature but still-lively Pacino grounds Carlito’s Way in a grittier, lived-in reality, as the tone of De Palma’s film flits between romanticism and cynicism. Wrapped in rich colours and reflective surfaces and featuring over-excited supporting performances by Sean Penn and John Leguizamo, it’s a stylish, mournful crime tale nestled in a well-dressed, flush-with-cash pocket of the American 70s.

Director: Spike Lee

In following up his mammoth biopic of Malcolm X (1992), Spike Lee split creative duties with his siblings Joie and Cinqué, co-writing a coming-of-age story about a young girl – Troy (Zelda Harris) – and her rambunctious brothers in the summer of ‘73 in Bedford-Stuyvesant, New York. As their parents, Alfre Woodard and Delroy Lindo give two of the most magnetic performances in a Spike Lee film; their fraught relationship and strict parenting offer a window into the precarity underpinning Troy’s childhood. 

Every Spike Lee joint is notable for making idiosyncratic visual choices, and by shooting the scenes where Troy stays with her Southern relatives with an anamorphic lens, there is a strange squeezing effect that bluntly reflects Troy’s anxiety. It’s a relief to escape back to New York, but only for a brief moment, as Crooklyn turns to tragedy and swiftly shifts Troy’s story into a reflection on the most naive chapters of our childhood.

Director: Lesli Linka Glatter

When four childhood friends reunite in their sleepy Indiana hometown to help their friend give birth, they reminisce on a pivotal summer in 1970 where their fascination with the paranormal and solving a local mystery collides with more grounded and painful changes — like the death of a parent or a looming divorce. 

Directed by Lesli Linka Glatter, Now and Then aims for a similar sunbaked and squabbling tone as Rob Reiner’s Stand by Me (1986), with the four young actresses Christina Ricci, Thora Birch, Gaby Hoffmann and Ashleigh Aston Moore brimming with determination and indecision. Screenwriter I. Marlene King favours a vignette structure of escalating episodes across the 1970 summer and ends with far more optimism, but Now and Then shares with Stand by Me a desire to show glimpses of a darker, sobering adult world – notably a brief but honest conversation with a young vagrant Vietnam veteran, played by Brendan Fraser.

Director: Ang Lee

It’s Thanksgiving in Connecticut, and the veneer of domestic calm is about to be ruptured by a series of outbursts, indiscretions and an inconvenient ice storm. Ang Lee’s adaptation of Rick Moody’s novel takes us deep inside the malaise of the Hood and Carver families, who live in suburban enclaves on the edge of the New England wilderness. These families turn their gaze from the poisoned ennui of middle-class life in 1973 America until it almost eats them whole. 

Lee renders the tense drama with subdued, murky colours and deliberate, distant blocking. Surrounded by so much dead air, the lively performances by Kevin Kline, Joan Allen and Sigourney Weaver have a jagged and wounded feel. Performances from teenage actors Christina Ricci, Tobey Maguire and Elijah Wood are central here — through them, adult audiences in 1997 gained a window into the atmospheres of secrecy and despondency that they grew up inside.

Director: Sofia Coppola

Sofia Coppola’s debut feature is a cornerstone film about girlhood, even though the five Catholic sisters at the centre of the director’s elegiac, dreamlike deconstruction of suburban bliss do not give access to their perspective. Instead, the story is told through the confused but potent memories of the boys who shared their Michigan neighbourhood and who are still haunted by the girls’ enigmatic decision to kill themselves. 

Flooded with natural light and saturated pastel colours, The Virgin Suicides contrasts its delicate, hesitant characters with a sense of approaching, unspoken danger. It uses its slightly anonymous 70s period setting to evoke the feeling that the Lisbon sisters are lost to history, fated to be resurrected in nostalgic but uncomfortable memories of men who realised too late how punishing their domestic life could be. In 1975 America, adolescence’s curiosity came second to patriarchal conformity, a doctrine the Lisbon sisters recognised better than their male peers.

Director: David Fincher

David Fincher’s finest film spans the 1970s and beyond, beginning in the dwindling months of the 60s when a cryptophile serial killer terrorised northern California with brutal violence and frustrating coded letters, and ending on a queasily ambiguous note in the early 90s. With a meticulous approach to historical procedure, Fincher’s perfectionist approach is eerily apt for a story about flawed investigations turning up only frustration and depression. 

As the cartoonist-turned-detective Robert Graysmith, Jake Gyllenhaal pursues the path of least catharsis, forming theories that have no possibility of ever being answered. He ends the decade with a disquieting and unshakeable sense of failure. Fincher reconstructs a drab and murky 70s California for a narrative that feels like a rebuke to our fascination with true-crime stories. We can dig as deep as we want, but the past won’t turn up anything new, satisfying or truthful.

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson

It’s 1970 Los Angeles, and although the vestiges of countercultural hippiedom are seen all over Paul Thomas Anderson’s rich period crime film, their political idealism and anti-establishment resolve are completely dead, consumed by the superior might of cops and corporations. Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix) is a lovesick stoner private eye whose search for two missing men runs him afoul of the feds, Nazis and the bullish, homoerotic detective Bigfoot Bjornsen (Josh Brolin).

An adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s postmodern detective novel, Anderson’s funniest film delights in a succession of plot digressions and complications that illuminate the subtle distinctions between paranoia and stupidity. It’s a romantic spin on Pynchon’s prose that lampoons Californian cynicism while eulogising those who didn’t get the memo that the 60s was dead and buried.

Director: Shane Black

Indulging in period pastiche, slapstick and side-splitting banter, Shane Black’s buddy comedy throwback is like a pulp novel punched up with a delicious and juvenile sense of humour. Ryan Gosling plays Holland March, a hopeless private eye and single dad, and Russell Crowe is the no-nonsense enforcer Jackson Healy – the pair have some of the more electric and disarming chemistry in any studio film of the past decade. 

Black’s story is a convoluted murder mystery that bridges anti-corporate investigative journalism and the world of pornographic filmmaking, where obscene images are used as a cudgel against blank-faced ’70s corruption. By comparison, good-natured losers like March and Healy seem like “nice guys”.

Director: Barry Jenkins

After his historic Best Picture win for Moonlight (2016), Barry Jenkins selected James Baldwin’s 1974 Harlem love story novel as his next project. In non-linear fashion, the film follows Tish (KiKi Layne) and Fonny (Stephan James), a young Black couple in 70s New York, trying to clear Fonny’s name after he is wrongfully charged with rape. 

Aided by Nicholas Britell’s aching, expansive score and James Laxton’s pristine cinematography, which includes several striking shots of actors staring into the lens, If Beale Street Could Talk is a textured look at a couple trying to foster love and community in an era of pronounced racial injustice – a pervading structural tension that occasionally takes physical form with Ed Skrein’s vile Officer Bell. Parallel to Fonny’s incarceration is the journey of Tish’s pregnancy – both plotlines are marked by apprehension about the future; that their hope will become victim to the ugly will of history.

Director: Kelly Fremon Craig

It took nearly 50 years for Judy Blume’s middle-grade novel to be adapted for the screen, making the 1970 story a period piece when The Edge of Seventeen director Kelly Fremon Craig and producer James L. Brooks delivered the goods in 2023. Abby Ryder Fortson is 11-year-old Margaret, whose move to New Jersey suburbs with her Christian mother (Rachel McAdams) and Jewish father (Benny Safdie) coincides with a preteen identity crisis. 

Why are relationships with her grandparents strained? Why do her parents bristle at curiosity about religion? Alongside the typical cusp-of-puberty drama, Are You There God? honours the frank liberal politics of Blume’s novel, which featured parents whose attempts to uncomplicate the issue of religion leaves their child unhelpfully in the dark. With affecting charm, Fremon Craig pays homage to a generation who needed a roadmap through a social turning point in 70s America.