The Conversation
1974 Nominee

100 Words
My mom used to play this song that I loved and the lyrics went, “Let’s give them something to talk about/A little mystery to figure out,” and I can’t remember the name of the song, but also it reminds me of this insane movie.

An illustration of paranoia that rivals a Hitchcock story, Gene Hackman plays a man in surveillance whose obsession with what he overhears drives him to madness. Add in a sprinkle of trauma responding (one of his previous projects led to murder) and it becomes a recipe for a thriller that rightly earned its nomination this year.