Jaws (1975)

Steven Spielberg laid the template for the modern summer blockbuster with this expert thriller about the hunt for a man-eating great white shark.

The young Steven Spielberg had terrorised audiences with his truck-with-a-mind-of-its-own debut Duel (1971) and bigger budget Jaws confirmed him as a filmmaker of tension-ratcheting abilities not seen since the heyday of Alfred Hitchcock.

Based on a pulpy bestseller by Peter Benchley, this is a masterfully constructed thriller about three disparate men – a cop (Roy Scheider), a scientist (Richard Dreyfuss) and a sea dog (Robert Shaw) – setting out in a boat to capture a shark that’s terrorising swimmers off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard.

From the classic opening, in which two amorous teenagers leave a beach party to take a perilous dip, through numerous brilliantly set up, precisely edited subsequent attack sequences, Spielberg’s chilling adventure is the rollercoaster movie par excellence.

1975 USA
Directed by
Steven Spielberg
Produced by
Richard D. Zanuck, David Brown
Written by
Peter Benchley, Carl Gottlieb, Howard Sackler, John Milius
Featuring
Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss
Running time
125 minutes

Ranked in The Greatest Films of All Time poll

Sight and Sound

Who voted for Jaws

Critics

Tom Beasley
UK
John Bleasdale
UK/Italy
Lucy Bolton
UK
Ava Cahen
France
Carlos Cháves Rodriguez
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Joaquín Chazarreta
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Jane Crowther
UK
Tóth Csaba
Hungary
Rahul Desai
India
Kate Erbland
USA
Alistair Harkness
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Mark Harris
USA
Courtney Howard
USA
Cael Keegan
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Karen Krizanovich
UK
Victoria Luxford
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Kevin Lyons
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USA
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Andrew Osmond
UK
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UK
Pia Reiser
Austria
Mark Salisbury
UK
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USA
Ben Stoddart
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Canada
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Canada

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Thailand
Henry Blake
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Sean Durkin
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Ireland
Mark Gustafson
USA
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Justin Kurzel
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Romania
Kemp Powers
United States
Ti West
USA

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