1974: The Conversation

Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation, which follows a private detective specializing in surveillance, is the film you can try to like better than The Godfather if you think you have a deficit in the department of original opinions. And there's a reason for that - which doesn't mean at all that The Conversation is a bad film (7). Bill Butler's cinematography deserves special mention. It is as unspectacular as it gets, yet miles away from the anyone-can-run-a-camera photography that you get in much TV and some made-for-theatres movies.