America is celebrating its 250th anniversary this summer, and while movies haven’t been around that long, they’ve existed long enough to have their own gold anniversaries.
1976 was a great year for movies, with instant classics like The Omen, The Bad News Bears, Freaky Friday and Network delighting audiences and winning a few awards here and there.
It’s a testament to how great ‘76 was for film that none of those pictures are on Watch With Us’ list of the five movies turning 50 in 2026 that you need to watch right now.
From inspirational dramas like Rocky on Netflix to thrillers like Marathon Man on Prime Video, these films have stood the test of time and have earned the right to be called a “masterpiece.”
‘Rocky’ – Netflix
There are sports classics like Rudy and Field of Dreams, and then there’s Rocky. The Academy Award for Best Picture winner of 1976 is still going strong in 2026, with numerous sequels and Creed spinoffs keeping the franchise alive. But there’s no beating the original, which is a gritty reminder that underdog sports stories have a universal appeal that can tighten bonds between friends and unite even the most spiteful enemies.
Sylvester Stallone wrote and stars as the title character, a working-class Philadelphia native who is randomly selected to fight heavyweight boxing champion Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) in an upcoming match celebrating America’s bicentennial anniversary. Rocky has no chance of winning, but he trains anyway, determined not to be embarrassed in front of millions of viewers. Outside of the ring, he develops a tentative romance with his best friend’s sister, Adrian (Talia Shire). She believes in him when no one else does, and that gives Rocky enough courage to believe he can beat Apollo and become a professional boxer.
What else is there to say about Rocky? From its iconic training montage that ends at the Philadelphia Museum of Art to the unexpectedly moving finale, Rocky is a classic that still makes grown men cry. Even though he was nominated for Best Actor, Stallone doesn’t get enough credit for his performance in this movie. It’s surprisingly subtle, and he convincingly conveys all the complicated feelings Balboa experiences as he gets closer to the big fight – and winning Adrian’s heart.
‘Marathon Man’ – MGM+
Thomas Levy (Dustin Hoffman) is just another college student living in New York City when he gets pulled into a conspiracy involving Nazis, covert government spies, international assassins and diamond smuggling. It seems Thomas’ brother, Henry (Roy Scheider), is a secret government agent pursuing Christian Szell (Laurence Olivier), a former Nazi who stole from his Jewish patients, converted his wealth into diamonds and stashed them with his brother in NYC. When his brother dies, Szell comes out of hiding to get those diamonds back, and the only people who know where they are Thomas and Henry.
Marathon Man is plot-heavy, with lots of exposition telling you who did what, when they did and what they want now. But it’s also genuinely thrilling, with scenes involving shoot-outs, fistfights and a climactic Mexican standoff that probably made Quentin Tarantino envious when he saw it. While it’s hard to buy the then-38-year-old Hoffman as a college student, costar Olivier is all too believable as one of the world’s most evil people – a dentist. His infamous dental torture scene with Hoffman is so good, it’s excruciating, and you’ll never forget to floss ever again after watching it.
‘All the President’s Men’ – Prime Video
On June 17, 1972, five men broke into the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. The seemingly minor event set off a chain of events that led to the downfall of President Richard Nixon and the publication of All the President’s Men, which was quickly adapted into a movie directed by Alan J. Pakula.
Instead of being a purely political film, All the President’s Men is more of a journalistic thriller as two Washington Post reporters, Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman), follow the bread crumbs from Watergate to the White House. Investigating the world’s most powerful man isn’t easy, and both reporters face numerous setbacks and vague threats that almost derail their investigation. Still, they persist, and their determination to find the truth results in the biggest story of their lives and a scandal that forever changed American politics.
Nominated for eight Oscars, All the President’s Men is the high point of the ‘70s-era political thriller. That it’s mostly based on real-life events makes all the dangers Woodward and Bernstein face all the more chilling. Everyone knows how this movie ends, but it’s the journey, especially the meticulously detailed fact-finding process the two men go through to write their story, that makes All the President’s Men a timeless classic that still is all too relevant in the Trump era.
‘Murder By Death’ – YouTube
Long before the Scary Movie and Naked Gun franchises, there was Murder by Death, a wacky spoof of the mystery genre filled with non-sequiturs, scatalogical humor and dead-accurate impersonations of some pretty famous detectives. When the enigmatic millionaire Lionel Twain (Truman Capote, because why not?) invites five famous detectives and their companions for “dinner and murder” at his secluded mansion, they have no choice but to accept. When a murder does indeed happen, they have to band together to figure out who did it, with which weapon and the motive behind the crime.
Murder by Death has about a joke every 30 seconds, so if one falls flat, you don’t have to wait long for another to arrive. The joke-to-laugh ratio is pretty high, especially if you’re a fan of old-school mysteries like The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man and classic Hollywood stars like Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Written by theater legend Neil Simon, the screenplay has high and low-brow humor, and a running bit with a blind butler (played by Obi-Wan himself, Alec Guinness) that’s one of the film’s highlights.
‘Carrie’ – Tubi
High school was never more hellish than it was in the original Carrie – and that’s even before the prom dance massacre that made this movie so famous. Directed by Brian De Palma from a novel by then-newbie author Stephen King, Carrie depicts the pretty awful life of telekinetic 16-year-old Carrie White (Sissy Spacek), who is relentlessly bullied by her peers and is terrorized at home by her religious fanatic mother, Margaret (a fantastic Piper Laurie). Salvation comes when the school’s hot jock, Tommy Ross (William Katt), asks her to the prom, but it’s just another way for her peers to humiliate her. Carrie can only take so much, so when she’s pushed over the edge, everyone who has ever made her suffer will pay with their lives.
What’s remarkable about Carrie is how restrained it is — well, until the bloody, Grand Guignol finale. For the bulk of its running time, it’s pretty much a standard coming-of-age drama, albeit one with a mounting unease and dread lurking around the corner. You know something bad is going to happen, but you don’t know quite what until the end, when Carrie – and De Palma – unleashes their apocalyptic fury in an orgy of pig’s blood, practical effects, and split screen shots. Spacek and Laurie were nominated for Oscars at a time when the horror genre wasn’t recognized at all by the Academy, and their performances still have the power to evoke sorrow, pity and sheer terror. The fake-out ending is the cherry on the top of a horror classic sundae – even happy endings don’t end happily in Carrie.
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