Breakdown: 1975 (Morgan Neville, 2025, USA)

Breakdown: 1975 is the latest documentary from Morgan Neville, known for his pop culture documentaries including the much-accoladed 20 Feet from Stardom (2014), Best of Enemies (2015), and Won’t You Be My Neighbor? (2018). Neville has a breezy, workmanlike style that is unintrusive and lends itself to the kind of casual explorations that appear on Netflix from time to time. Breakdown: 1975 is somewhat self-reflexive in that it is an examination of film history.

Certain years have a certain power to film lovers in the strength of their output (1999 comes to mind), and 1975 is certainly one of those years. It was both the apotheosis of the New Hollywood, with mainstream successes such as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and also, in some sense, its death knell with the advent of the modern blockbuster in Jaws and the dominance of crowd-pleasing films with the following year’s Rocky. Neville cheats a bit in that the film is not explicitly limited to 1975, but rather to 70s cinema more broadly, with a particular emphasis on the window from 1974-1976 (there is much talk about Taxi Driver, for example, which didn’t come out until 1976).

The film is peppered with talking heads, including many critics, filmmakers (Scorsese appears frequently), and actors and actresses from the time period (including Ellen Burstyn). The film also serves as a cultural history of the 1970s in America, devoting segments not only to keystones such as Watergate and the Vietnam War, but also Gerald Ford, television (All in the Family), and the advent of the me-generation and self-help movements. Neville’s film does not bring any new revelations to the table, but would serve as a great companion piece to Peter Biskind’s quintessential book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (Biskind is, not coincidentally, a prominently featured talking head throughout Neville’s film).

7/10