Saturday Night Fever (1977)

The way John Travolta walks, talks and moves in this film is so effortlessly cool that you can only imagine the entire role was constructed around him. By day he works in a hardware shop in New York. At night, he dances in the local clubs where his astonishing moves have earned him a level of respect he cannot find in regular society, nor in his home life.  

It tackles issues including religion, class, social mobility, gender roles and the state of New York in the 1970s, but never in a heavy-handed manner.

Both incredibly dramatic and desperately sad, in some ways it’s a New York version of the sort of stories told in Billy Liar and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning – a young man tries to rise above his background to make his way in the world while negative forces conspire to keep him down.