Spinoff: Best Movie From 1976 Oscars

I'd go with Taxi Driver with Rocky being a distant second. Scorsese/De Niro are tough to beat.

Taxi Driver easily. It's one of the ten greatest American films of all-time. Actors in New York used to carry a picture of Robert De Niro in their wallet because they were so inspired by his work in this movie.

Honestly you can pick any movie you listed, make a case for either one being the best movie that year, and I absolutely wouldn't argue with you. However, my favorites from that year would be Taxi Driver, Network, All the President's Men, and Rocky. All those movies were awesome. Never seen Bound for Glory though, but I need to check it out eventually.

I've only seen Rocky so I'll go with Rocky.

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Rocky

All The presidents Men

Network

Taxi Driver

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Those are 4 pretty good movies right there. Network is probably the best "film" if you really want to break it down, but none of those 4 stands head and shoulders ahead of the others.

Because it became a franchise, Rocky is looked down on, but that's revisionism IMHO. That original film absolutely changed sports movies. It remains a fantastic piece of film. Based solely on their acting credentials (to that point, anyway), we shouldn't have gotten such good performances from Weathers, Stallone, Shire, among others in the film, but it was a combination that worked.

All The President's Men had one of the best casts of the entire decade, excluding big budget disaster films and A Bridge Too Far. And, because they all hated Nixon's guts, they all gave A+ efforts. When you have a film where Pacino, Redford, Holbrook, Jack Warden and Martin Balsam give it 100% - you're going to have a good movie if the script is a cookbook.

And Taxi Driver was Marty and Deniro's coming out party. That movie was dark even for the dark 70s - at least for a mainstream film. The only knock on it for the pantheon of Scorcese films is he didn't really have much balance of the dark with some light.

Network was brilliant from beginning to end and is relatively forgotten, IMHO.

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Those are 4 pretty good movies right there. Network is probably the best "film" if you really want to break it down, but none of those 4 stand head and shoulders ahead of the others.

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I respectfully disagree. Rocky is an American classic and Network is still relevant as ever but Taxi Driver is an all time great. Scorsese and De Niro teamed up to make the best movie of the year more than once. Raging Bull was the best movie of 1980 (it lost to Ordinary People for best picture), The King of Comedy was the best of 83 IMO, and Mean Streets might be the best of 73. That director/actor combo is unrivaled in American film.

Taxi Driver No. 15 on TSPDT Top 1000 movies

Just a subjective list of course, highly ranked on AFI and Sight and Sound as well. Rocky is still Rocky though, the academy didn't get it entirely wrong like they do most years.

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But it does point out the race for blood and guts and ratings.

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Disagree with that being their central point. Muckraking was understood to be a decades old phenomena. Sex and violence were well established staples of generating public interest.

The most visionary thing about Network was that it predicted reality television. And that is probably the most profound change in television over the last forty years.

It not only predicted reality tv it also predicted modern cable news opinion programs. It totally nailed how loud and outlandish antics on tv = ratings....and how easily the public is captivated by it. This is the essential point of the movie to me, and it carries over seamlessly to modern media. Why do you think every other website has pictures of tits and celebrity slideshows at the bottom of the page? Because they get views and clicks...we as consumers eat up that garbage like nothing else.

Damn, that's a great field. I have never seen All The Presidents Men, so I will put it on my list. But for the ones I have seen:

Taxi Driver
Rocky
Network
Bound For Glory


4 Really Good movies there.