There is no objective, universally accepted list of the 100 best films of the 1970s. This is an editorial ranking that weighs enduring critical esteem, artistic influence, historical importance, and range across countries, genres, filmmaking traditions, and forms. The order is therefore best understood as a defensible starting canon—not a final verdict.
The decade ran from the disruptive American cinema of Taxi Driver, Chinatown, and Apocalypse Now to the international ambitions of Mirror, The Travelling Players, Touki Bouki, and Garm Hava. It also produced genre landmarks such as Jaws, Alien, Halloween, and Dawn of the Dead. The 2022 Sight and Sound critics’ poll, which placed Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles at number one, is a useful reminder that the accepted canon changes as neglected films and filmmakers receive closer attention.
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How this 1970s movie ranking was chosen
The list uses theatrical feature-release years from 1970 through 1979, while recognizing that festival premieres, domestic releases, restorations, and regional release dates can sometimes produce different years. The ranking considers:
- Long-term critical esteem: whether a film has remained important across generations of critics, scholars, filmmakers, and audiences.
- Formal and artistic influence: what the film changed in cinematography, editing, performance, sound, narrative, genre, or production.
- Cultural and historical significance: how effectively it captures, challenges, or reshapes the period in which it was made.
- Range: representation across geography, genre, gender, race, class, documentary and fiction, popular and experimental cinema.
Awards and box-office success are useful context, but neither is treated as proof that a film belongs at a particular position. The American New Hollywood movement is central to the decade, but the 1970s cannot honestly be reduced to Hollywood. Cinema from Belgium, the USSR, Italy, West Germany, Sweden, Greece, Japan, India, Senegal, Australia, and many other places belongs in the conversation.
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#1 Best Overall
The 100 best movies of the 1970s
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The Godfather (1972) — Francis Ford Coppola
Coppola’s crime saga turns the rise and moral corrosion of a Mafia family into an American epic about inheritance, power, and belonging. Its controlled performances, shadowy photography, patient escalation, and operatic structure helped define the possibilities of the modern studio film. Its Best Picture win confirms its historical impact, but the film’s lasting stature goes far beyond awards.
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Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) — Chantal Akerman
Akerman transforms domestic routine into suspense, social observation, and radical formal cinema. The precise repetition of Jeanne’s household labor makes time, exhaustion, and confinement visible. Its number-one placement in the 2022 Sight and Sound critics’ poll marked a major shift in the critical canon toward women’s filmmaking, duration, and experiences historically treated as too ordinary for epic art.
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Apocalypse Now (1979) — Francis Ford Coppola
A hallucinatory journey through the Vietnam War, Coppola’s film moves from military adventure to metaphysical nightmare. Its immense production, sound design, editing, performances, and images of institutional madness create an experience that feels both grand and unstable. The film’s very excess becomes part of its argument about war, imperial power, and the difficulty of representing catastrophe.
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Taxi Driver (1976) — Martin Scorsese
Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader create an intensely subjective portrait of loneliness, resentment, and urban alienation. Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle is neither a simple villain nor a misunderstood hero; the film traps the viewer inside a mind turning grievance into violence. Its nocturnal New York, unsettling score, and fractured point of view remain foundational to modern American cinema.
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The Godfather Part II (1974) — Francis Ford Coppola
Rather than merely repeat its predecessor, Coppola expands the family saga across two timelines. Michael Corleone’s consolidation of power is set against the immigrant beginnings of his father, creating a devastating contrast between aspiration and moral emptiness. It is simultaneously a gangster epic, a family tragedy, and one of the most ambitious sequels ever made.
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Mirror (1975) — Andrei Tarkovsky
Tarkovsky’s most autobiographical film is built from memories, dreams, poetry, newsreels, and shifting historical time. Instead of a conventional plot, it follows the emotional logic of recollection. Fire, wind, water, faces, and empty rooms become carriers of memory, producing a film that is intimate and national at once.
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Barry Lyndon (1975) — Stanley Kubrick
Kubrick adapts Thackeray’s picaresque novel as a cool, painterly study of ambition and social performance. Natural-light interiors, candlelit scenes, symmetrical compositions, and deliberately distant narration make every frame resemble an old master painting. Ryan O’Neal’s blankness is crucial: Barry moves through a world of rituals without ever mastering its emotional or political rules.
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Stalker (1979) — Andrei Tarkovsky
Three men enter a forbidden landscape said to contain a room that grants a person’s deepest wish. The premise becomes a philosophical examination of faith, desire, art, and the fear of discovering what one truly wants. Tarkovsky’s long takes and mysterious spaces ask viewers to surrender the demand for explanation and attend to atmosphere, doubt, and spiritual tension.
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Chinatown (1974) — Roman Polanski
Polanski and screenwriter Robert Towne revive film noir while turning its private-eye mythology into a story of water, land, wealth, and civic corruption. Jack Nicholson’s performance balances charm with helplessness, while Los Angeles becomes a sunlit labyrinth. The film’s famous final movement gives its investigation a historical bleakness that conventional detective triumph cannot resolve.
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A Woman Under the Influence (1974) — John Cassavetes
Gena Rowlands and Peter Falk lead Cassavetes’s emotionally volatile examination of marriage, mental illness, family pressure, and social conformity. The loose camera and improvisational energy never reduce Mabel to a diagnosis. Instead, the film asks who gets to define normality and how love can become both refuge and another form of control.
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Amarcord (1973) — Federico Fellini
Fellini’s half-remembered portrait of a provincial Italian town under Fascism blends adolescent desire, comic grotesquerie, political menace, and lyrical nostalgia. The town is not reconstructed as an objective past; it is reinvented as a carnival of memory. Its warmth and absurdity coexist with the quiet normalization of authoritarianism.
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Jaws (1975) — Steven Spielberg
Jaws established the modern summer blockbuster without sacrificing craft. Spielberg turns the unseen shark into a masterclass in suspense, then grounds the spectacle in competing personalities, civic denial, and professional responsibility. Its influence reaches across editing, sound, marketing, and audience expectation, proving that popular cinema can also be formally precise and dramatically durable.
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The Conformist (1970) — Bernardo Bertolucci
Bertolucci’s visually elaborate political drama follows a man seeking safety through obedience to Fascism. Wide-angle compositions, geometric architecture, elaborate movement, and shifting light externalize the protagonist’s psychological submission. The film’s beauty is deliberately troubling: style becomes a way to examine how people aestheticize, rationalize, and participate in political evil.
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Nashville (1975) — Robert Altman
Altman’s sprawling ensemble film interweaves musicians, politicians, workers, celebrities, and strangers over several days in Tennessee. Overlapping dialogue and multiple storylines create a democratic but cacophonous portrait of America. Country music, campaign spectacle, celebrity culture, and private loneliness combine into a political film that rarely delivers its argument directly.
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A Clockwork Orange (1971) — Stanley Kubrick
Kubrick’s stylized dystopia follows Alex, a charismatic delinquent subjected to behavioral conditioning. Its violence, sexual menace, artificial slang, and satirical production design remain deliberately confrontational. The film’s central question is whether enforced goodness is meaningfully moral if it removes choice. It should be approached as a disturbing argument, not as an endorsement of Alex’s conduct.
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Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) — Werner Herzog
Herzog’s feverish historical adventure follows Spanish conquistadors searching for El Dorado as their expedition dissolves into paranoia and madness. Klaus Kinski’s performance gives Aguirre an almost supernatural volatility, while the jungle resists the colonizers’ desire to turn it into property. The film’s stark locations and existential intensity make conquest feel like collective hallucination.
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Annie Hall (1977) — Woody Allen
With direct address, fractured chronology, animation, subtitles for hidden thoughts, and comic digressions, Annie Hall made romantic self-analysis into an innovative mainstream form. Its wit and formal play remain influential, even as contemporary viewers may assess its gender politics and autobiographical persona more critically than earlier audiences did.
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The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) — VĂctor Erice
Erice’s quiet Spanish masterpiece filters postwar repression through a child’s imagination after she watches Frankenstein. Sparse dialogue, amber interiors, and the haunting Castilian landscape create a world where political trauma is sensed rather than explained. The film respects childhood mystery while showing how history enters consciousness through images and silence.
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Don’t Look Now (1973) — Nicolas Roeg
Grief, premonition, marriage, and fractured perception collide in Roeg’s Venetian psychological thriller. Its editing crosscuts time and sensation, making cause and effect feel unstable. The city’s canals and narrow passages become a maze of mourning. The film’s erotic and violent material is inseparable from its attempt to represent a couple struggling to live after loss.
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Alien (1979) — Ridley Scott
Scott combines science fiction, horror, industrial design, and workplace drama in a film whose spaceship feels both functional and oppressive. The creature’s design, sound, pacing, and use of darkness make the threat tactile without overexposing it. Ripley’s emergence as the survivor at the center of the film helped reshape the genre’s ideas about authority and heroism.
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Star Wars (1977) — George Lucas
Lucas’s space opera revived serial adventure through widescreen spectacle, memorable sound, mythic structure, practical effects, and an instantly legible moral universe. Its cultural reach is enormous, but its importance is not only commercial: it transformed blockbuster world-building, special-effects production, merchandising, and the relationship between film and popular mythology.
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Wanda (1970) — Barbara Loden
Loden’s stark, semi-improvised film follows a divorced Pennsylvania woman drifting through economic and emotional marginalization. Wanda’s passivity is not romanticized; it registers how limited her choices have become. The rough textures, nonprofessional presence, and refusal of conventional redemption make this one of the decade’s most important portraits of working-class female alienation.
Rank #2
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Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974) — Jacques Rivette
Rivette’s playful, mysterious film follows two women whose friendship opens onto a repeating melodrama inside a strange house. Performance, role-playing, storytelling, and cinema itself become forms of shared invention. Its generous feminism and delight in female collaboration distinguish it from the male-centered auteur myths surrounding much 1970s art cinema.
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One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) — Miloš Forman
Forman’s institutional drama pits rebellious Randle McMurphy against a psychiatric ward governed by Nurse Ratched. The film’s humane ensemble, comic rhythm, and escalating conflict made it a defining critique of bureaucratic control. Its reputation is complicated by later debates about representation of mental illness, but its impact and emotional force remain substantial.
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The Conversation (1974) — Francis Ford Coppola
Gene Hackman plays a surveillance expert whose professional detachment collapses when he suspects a recording may lead to murder. Coppola uses sound as both plot and psychology: fragments change meaning as they are replayed, isolated, and reinterpreted. The film is a precise study of privacy, guilt, technology, and the burden of listening.
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Killer of Sheep (1977) — Charles Burnett
Burnett’s intimate independent film observes a Los Angeles slaughterhouse worker, his family, and his neighborhood with extraordinary patience. Episodic scenes, location shooting, music, and nonprofessional performers create a social world rather than a conventional plot. Its quietness is political: Black working-class life is rendered as complex, beautiful, pressured, and worthy of sustained attention.
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Days of Heaven (1978) — Terrence Malick
Malick’s pastoral tragedy follows migrant laborers whose temporary escape into the Texas wheat fields is shadowed by deception and desire. The celebrated “magic hour” photography does not simply beautify the landscape; it contrasts natural cycles with human exploitation. Voice-over narration gives the film a childlike, elliptical emotional register that resists ordinary explanation.
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The Deer Hunter (1978) — Michael Cimino
Cimino’s epic moves from a close-knit Pennsylvania steel town to the trauma of Vietnam and back again. Its ceremonial first section makes the later rupture devastating, while the central performances explore friendship, masculinity, injury, and memory. The film remains controversial for its representation of the war, but its formal ambition and emotional scale are undeniable.
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Cries and Whispers (1972) — Ingmar Bergman
Bergman stages illness, resentment, intimacy, and death inside a mansion saturated with red. The close-ups are almost unbearably attentive to faces and bodily suffering, while the film’s structure makes memory and compassion feel fragile. Its severe visual design is not decorative: color becomes an emotional architecture for relationships that language cannot repair.
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Manhattan (1979) — Woody Allen
Shot in luminous black and white, Manhattan turns New York into a romantic and intellectual landscape while examining self-deception, artistic vanity, and desire. Its visual influence is considerable, but the film’s relationships—including its older-man-younger-girl premise—require critical distance. Its place here reflects craft and cultural impact, not unqualified approval of every viewpoint.
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McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) — Robert Altman
Altman’s revisionist western replaces frontier heroics with mud, rain, commerce, and precarious community. Warren Beatty and Julie Christie play entrepreneurs whose partnership grows inside a town being transformed by capitalism. Leonard Cohen’s songs and Vilmos Zsigmond’s hazy photography give the film a melancholy sense of history arriving before anyone understands its cost.
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The Travelling Players (1975) — Theo Angelopoulos
Angelopoulos follows a theatrical troupe across decades of Greek political upheaval. Long takes and movements through landscape collapse private drama, performance, and national history into one continuous passage of time. The film demands patience, but rewards it with a distinctive understanding of how political violence reshapes memory, family, art, and public space.
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Eraserhead (1977) — David Lynch
Lynch’s debut creates an industrial nightmare from anxiety about sex, parenthood, work, and bodily transformation. Its stark black-and-white imagery, mechanical soundscape, and grotesque dream logic make ordinary domestic responsibility feel cosmic and terrifying. Few films demonstrate so effectively how production design and sound can generate a world that seems to exist outside rational explanation.
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Performance (1970) — Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg
This strange collision of gangster film, rock culture, sexuality, and identity follows a fugitive who enters the home of an elusive musician. Cammell and Roeg dissolve personality through mirrors, music, editing, and role exchange. The result is disorienting by design: a film about performance that makes every stable identity appear temporary.
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The Exorcist (1973) — William Friedkin
Friedkin treats supernatural horror with procedural seriousness, domestic intimacy, and theological uncertainty. The film’s power comes as much from its performances, sound, pacing, and attention to a mother’s desperation as from its shocking imagery. Its difficult material should not be sensationalized; its lasting importance lies in how convincingly it makes terror enter an ordinary family home.
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Harold and Maude (1971) — Hal Ashby
A morbid young man and an exuberant older woman form an unconventional bond in Ashby’s warm, melancholy comedy. The film’s anti-authoritarian humor, Cat Stevens soundtrack, and rejection of respectable middle-class emptiness made it a countercultural touchstone. Beneath the eccentricity is a serious plea to treat mortality as a reason to live more fully.
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Husbands (1970) — John Cassavetes
Cassavetes follows three married men after the death of a friend, allowing grief to emerge through drinking, performance, aggression, and sudden travel. Its long scenes can feel unruly because the film is interested in behavior before explanation. The result is a raw examination of male friendship and the evasions used to avoid mourning.
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Kings of the Road (1976) — Wim Wenders
Two men travel along the inner-German border in a road movie about loneliness, cinema, and tentative friendship. Wenders gives the landscape time to breathe and treats movie theaters as endangered social spaces. The film’s episodic structure is less about destination than about the slow possibility of communication between damaged strangers.
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Dog Day Afternoon (1975) — Sidney Lumet
Lumet turns a Brooklyn bank robbery into a volatile portrait of media spectacle, public sympathy, policing, and desperation. Al Pacino’s performance captures Sonny’s charisma and panic without making him a conventional folk hero. Shot with documentary urgency, the film asks how quickly private crisis becomes entertainment once cameras and crowds arrive.
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The Last Picture Show (1971) — Peter Bogdanovich
Bogdanovich’s black-and-white portrait of a dying Texas town combines coming-of-age drama with an elegy for disappearing movie culture. Its teenagers, adults, and aging performers occupy a landscape of emotional and economic decline. The film’s formal classicism is not nostalgia alone; it measures what a community loses when its shared institutions disappear.
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Opening Night (1977) — John Cassavetes
Gena Rowlands plays an actor whose preparation for a new role becomes entangled with age, fear, fandom, and a young woman’s death. Cassavetes turns rehearsal into psychological combat, blurring performance and lived identity. It is a demanding but deeply sympathetic film about an artist refusing to become a public version of herself.
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A Touch of Zen (1971) — King Hu
King Hu begins with a quiet encounter in an abandoned fortress before expanding into an elegant wuxia epic of movement, disguise, spirituality, and resistance. Its compositions and action choreography are remarkably controlled, while its heroine is central to the film’s moral and physical energy. It remains a landmark of international martial-arts cinema.
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The French Connection (1971) — William Friedkin
Friedkin’s police thriller brought abrasive location realism, morally compromised protagonists, and kinetic editing into the mainstream. Gene Hackman’s Popeye Doyle is effective, prejudiced, reckless, and difficult to admire. The film’s Best Picture history is significant, but its deeper legacy is the gritty American crime style it helped popularize.
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The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978) — Ermanno Olmi
Olmi’s patient, humane film observes peasant families living on an Italian estate near the end of the nineteenth century. Nonprofessional actors and naturalistic detail create a communal portrait attentive to labor, faith, poverty, and seasonal time. Its quiet scale is precisely its achievement: history is shown through ordinary decisions rather than grand events.
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Network (1976) — Sidney Lumet
This furious satire imagines television news surrendering public responsibility to ratings, spectacle, and corporate logic. Its speeches are deliberately heightened, but the film’s newsroom mechanics and competing ambitions keep the critique grounded. It remains valuable not because every prediction came true, but because it understands how outrage can be packaged and sold.
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Scenes from a Marriage (1973) — Ingmar Bergman
Bergman’s examination of a long marriage unfolds through conversations that repeatedly change what the audience thinks it understands. Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson bring extraordinary precision to resentment, tenderness, betrayal, and dependence. Whether encountered in its television or theatrical form, it is a landmark of intimate performance and emotionally unsparing dialogue.
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In the Realm of the Senses (1976) — Nagisa Ōshima
Ōshima’s controversial film reconstructs an obsessive relationship that moves toward extremity. Its explicit sexuality is not incidental provocation; it examines desire, possession, power, and the collision between private erotic life and public authority. Viewers should expect difficult sexual and violent material, presented with an uncompromising refusal of conventional romantic distance.
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Badlands (1973) — Terrence Malick
Malick’s first feature transforms a crime story into a lyrical, unsettling portrait of two young people drifting through the American landscape. Sissy Spacek’s narration gives Holly’s account a childlike calm that clashes with the violence around her. The film’s beauty is deliberately disquieting, exposing how movies and fantasies can romanticize destruction.
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Mean Streets (1973) — Martin Scorsese
Scorsese’s breakthrough brings Little Italy to life through music, handheld movement, religious guilt, and volatile male friendship. Charlie’s struggle between criminal obligation and moral aspiration is inseparable from the neighborhood’s codes. The film’s energy, editing, and use of popular music announced a new kind of personal American filmmaking.
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The Long Goodbye (1973) — Robert Altman
Altman relocates Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe to a morally casual 1970s Los Angeles. Elliott Gould plays him as a principled anachronism, loyal to habits that no longer make sense in a world of wellness culture, wealth, and betrayal. The film is a witty detective story and an elegy for vanished codes of conduct.
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The Mother and the Whore (1973) — Jean Eustache
Eustache’s long, talk-driven film places sex, jealousy, politics, and post-1968 disillusionment inside a shifting triangle. Its apparent casualness conceals careful observation of how people use ideas to avoid feeling. The film is not easy or brief, but its verbal density captures a generation discovering that liberation does not automatically produce emotional maturity.
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The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) — Luis Buñuel
Buñuel repeatedly interrupts a group of wealthy diners with dreams, theatrical reversals, political violence, and inexplicable obstacles. The comedy’s surreal structure exposes bourgeois manners as a performance built on appetite, denial, and force. Its deadpan tone makes the social critique sharper: absurdity is not an escape from reality but a description of it.
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The Wicker Man (1973) — Robin Hardy
Hardy’s folk-horror mystery sends a devout police officer to a remote island where local customs resist his assumptions about morality and order. Songs and communal rituals make the landscape feel seductive before the film turns its hospitality into menace. Its enduring power lies in the collision between religious certainty, pagan renewal, and social isolation.
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Solaris (1972) — Andrei Tarkovsky
Tarkovsky adapts Stanisław Lem’s science fiction into a meditation on grief, memory, responsibility, and the limits of human knowledge. The mysterious planet may be less an alien world than a mirror for unresolved guilt. Its long passages of travel, conversation, and contemplation challenge the speed expected from science fiction while deepening the genre’s philosophical possibilities.
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The Ascent (1977) — Larisa Shepitko
Set during the Nazi occupation of the Soviet Union, Shepitko’s austere war film follows two partisans whose capture forces a moral and spiritual reckoning. Snowy landscapes and stark faces turn the story into a passion play without simplifying courage or betrayal. It is one of the decade’s most powerful films about conscience under terror.
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The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) — Tobe Hooper
Hooper’s low-budget horror film uses sound, editing, location texture, and frantic physicality to create the impression of documentary nightmare. Its violence is difficult and should not be overstated as literal realism; the film’s achievement is how convincingly it manufactures panic from implication, noise, and disorientation. It permanently changed American horror’s visual and industrial vocabulary.
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The Parallax View (1974) — Alan J. Pakula
Pakula’s conspiracy thriller follows a journalist investigating a political assassination and an organization that recruits unstable outsiders. Empty architecture, long lenses, and ominous framing produce a world where institutions are visible but accountability is not. The film’s paranoia reflects post-Watergate distrust without reducing its mystery to a single explanatory answer.
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The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972) — Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Fassbinder confines a designer, her lover, assistant, and daughter to a lavish room where desire becomes hierarchy. The theatrical staging makes power legible: who stands, who kneels, who watches, and who remains silent. It is an unsentimental study of possession and dependence, with gender and class shaping every emotional transaction.
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F for Fake (1973) — Orson Welles
Welles’s final completed feature is a mischievous essay about forgery, authorship, magic, reputation, and cinematic deception. It refuses to separate truth from performance, using editing and direct address to make the viewer complicit in being fooled. The film is both a playful con and a serious argument that art is built from arranged appearances.
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The Holy Mountain (1973) — Alejandro Jodorowsky
Jodorowsky’s surreal pilgrimage follows an alchemist and a group of powerful figures toward an impossible summit. Its elaborate tableaux, religious imagery, violence, and grotesque satire make it an intentionally overwhelming experience. The film is best approached as an allegorical visual assault rather than a narrative puzzle with a single stable interpretation.
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3 Women (1977) — Robert Altman
Altman’s dreamlike California drama follows three women whose identities begin to merge after a young worker becomes attached to her more confident colleague. Desert spaces, murals, sound, and ambiguous transformations create a psychological landscape that never fully explains itself. Shelley Duvall’s performance is especially central to the film’s strange mixture of comedy, vulnerability, and menace.
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The American Friend (1977) — Wim Wenders
Wenders adapts Patricia Highsmith into a moody international thriller about illness, friendship, and an art-world conspiracy. Bruno Ganz and Dennis Hopper give the film contrasting emotional temperatures, while European locations and saturated color turn travel into dislocation. It is a crime film interested less in procedure than in the uneasy bonds formed by mortality.
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Autumn Sonata (1978) — Ingmar Bergman
Two extraordinary performances by Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullmann anchor this confrontation between a celebrated pianist and the daughter who feels abandoned by her. The film’s formal restraint leaves nowhere for old grievances to hide. Its dramatic force comes from recognizing that eloquence can reveal pain without necessarily repairing the relationships that caused it.
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The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979) — Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Fassbinder follows Maria through postwar Germany as personal survival becomes entangled with the country’s economic recovery. Hanna Schygulla’s controlled performance gives the film a hard, shifting center. Romance, commerce, national guilt, and reinvention converge in a melodrama that asks what prosperity costs when it is built on forgetting.
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All That Jazz (1979) — Bob Fosse
Fosse turns the life of a driven choreographer into a dazzling, self-lacerating musical about work, sex, illness, ego, and death. Editing moves between surgery, rehearsal, fantasy, and performance as if all were parts of one compulsive routine. Its brilliance is inseparable from its critique of the artist who treats self-destruction as professional commitment.
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The Passenger (1975) — Michelangelo Antonioni
Jack Nicholson plays a journalist who assumes a dead man’s identity and attempts to escape his own life. Antonioni treats travel as existential displacement rather than liberation, filling North African and European spaces with uncertainty. The celebrated final shot crystallizes the film’s fascination with the limits of knowledge, identity, and cinematic perspective.
Rank #4
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The Tin Drum (1979) — Volker Schlöndorff
Schlöndorff adapts Günter Grass’s novel through Oskar, a child who refuses to grow as Germany moves through Nazism and war. Grotesque fantasy, political allegory, and historical memory combine in an intentionally abrasive form. Its difficult imagery is part of a strategy to make ordinary adult society appear as irrational as the child’s resistance.
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The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978) — Fred Schepisi
Schepisi’s historical drama follows an Aboriginal man navigating violent colonial institutions in nineteenth-century Australia. The film refuses the comforting structure of individual assimilation or national reconciliation, showing how racism and dispossession shape every available choice. Its importance is both cinematic and historical: it confronts a national past that mainstream storytelling had long minimized.
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Dawn of the Dead (1978) — George A. Romero
Romero’s sequel expands zombie horror into a satire of consumer culture, social collapse, and militarized survival. The shopping mall offers comfort, abundance, and false security before becoming another trap. Graphic violence is central to the film’s shock, but so are its ensemble dynamics and its bleakly comic insight into how habits survive catastrophe.
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Halloween (1978) — John Carpenter
Carpenter establishes slasher conventions through controlled framing, point-of-view camerawork, an unforgettable synthesizer score, and patient suspense. Michael Myers is frightening partly because the film denies psychological explanation. Laurie Strode’s resourcefulness gives the climax shape, while the suburban setting demonstrates that horror can emerge from apparently ordinary, carefully observed spaces.
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Suspiria (1977) — Dario Argento
Argento builds a supernatural nightmare from saturated color, stylized architecture, aggressive music, and elaborate set pieces. The story is simple by design; sensation carries the film. Its violence can be intense, but its achievement lies in treating horror as an audiovisual environment where color, sound, and movement become sources of dread.
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The Last Detail (1973) — Hal Ashby
Two Navy sailors escort a young prisoner to military confinement and decide to give him a brief taste of freedom. Jack Nicholson, Otis Young, and Randy Quaid create a moving trio whose jokes cannot conceal institutional cruelty. Ashby balances road-movie looseness with a precise awareness of class, authority, masculinity, and wasted youth.
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The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974) — Joseph Sargent
This tightly constructed New York subway thriller derives suspense from procedure, timing, urban infrastructure, and the friction between ordinary workers and theatrical criminals. Walter Matthau’s transit officer gives the film dry intelligence, while the ensemble keeps the city alive beyond the hostage crisis. It remains a model of efficient, character-driven genre filmmaking.
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California Split (1974) — Robert Altman
Altman’s loose, melancholic gambling film follows two men whose friendship is energized by risk and threatened by it. Elliott Gould and George Segal give the relationship warmth without disguising its destructiveness. Casinos, racetracks, and bars become spaces where chance offers temporary relief from the harder gamble of ordinary life.
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Alice in the Cities (1974) — Wim Wenders
A blocked journalist reluctantly becomes responsible for a child while traveling through Europe and the United States. Wenders builds a gentle road movie from photographs, airports, hotel rooms, and hesitant conversation. Its emotional movement is modest but profound: alienation slowly gives way to attention, responsibility, and an imperfect form of companionship.
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The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974) — Werner Herzog
Herzog dramatizes the true story of a young man discovered after spending most of his life isolated from society. Bruno S.’s performance gives Kaspar an uncanny directness as institutions attempt to educate and classify him. The film questions whether civilization liberates people or merely teaches them the rules of a different confinement.
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The Go-Between (1971) — Joseph Losey
Losey adapts L. P. Hartley’s novel as a memory of class division, forbidden desire, and childhood complicity. A boy carries messages between two lovers without understanding the social danger surrounding them. Sumptuous period detail contrasts with emotional repression, creating a film about how the adult past remains lodged in an innocent witness.
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Walkabout (1971) — Nicolas Roeg
Roeg places two suburban children in the Australian outback after a family crisis and follows their encounter with an Aboriginal youth. The film’s visual power and critique of industrial society are significant, but its colonial gaze and treatment of Indigenous culture deserve careful scrutiny. It remains a beautiful, troubling work rather than a simple adventure.
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Five Easy Pieces (1970) — Bob Rafelson
Jack Nicholson plays a former pianist who has rejected his privileged background without finding a stable alternative. The film’s famous restaurant scene condenses its interest in class, entitlement, frustration, and performance. Rafelson’s road structure allows the character to move through America while revealing that escape from identity may be another form of self-dramatization.
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M*A*S*H (1970) — Robert Altman
Altman’s irreverent military comedy uses overlapping dialogue, episodic structure, and a corrosive sense of humor to challenge institutional authority. Although set during the Korean War, its release made it resonate strongly with the Vietnam era. The film’s anarchic energy helped announce a more improvisational, skeptical, and adult strain of American studio filmmaking.
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The Emigrants (1971) — Jan Troell
Troell’s historical epic follows a Swedish family leaving poverty for the United States in the nineteenth century. Its attention to landscape, labor, faith, family conflict, and the practical difficulty of migration prevents the journey from becoming a simple promise of renewal. The film treats emigration as both hope and painful severance.
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Xala (1975) — Ousmane Sembène
Sembène’s sharp Senegalese satire follows a businessman struck by impotence on the day he takes a third wife. The personal crisis exposes corruption, neocolonial privilege, patriarchy, and the hollowness of newly acquired status. Comedy gives the critique reach, while the film’s social specificity makes it a vital alternative to European and American political cinema.
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Touki Bouki (1973) — Djibril Diop Mambéty
Mambéty’s restless Senegalese film follows two young lovers dreaming of escape to Paris. Jump cuts, music, color, repetition, and abrupt tonal changes capture both the seduction and unreliability of fantasies about Europe. Its exuberant form makes migration a psychological and cultural question rather than merely a journey from one location to another.
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Harlan County USA (1976) — Barbara Kopple
Kopple’s documentary embeds itself in a Kentucky coal-miners’ strike, giving workers and families space to articulate danger, poverty, solidarity, and power. Its immediacy comes from sustained presence rather than detached explanation. The film is an essential example of documentary as witness, organizing tool, and record of collective resistance.
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All the President’s Men (1976) — Alan J. Pakula
Pakula turns investigative reporting into a tense procedural built from phone calls, documents, sources, and uncertainty. Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman play reporters whose persistence is matched by institutional obstruction. The film’s controlled visual design makes ordinary offices and parking garages feel dangerous, while its real subject is the fragile process by which public facts are established.
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The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) — Clint Eastwood
Eastwood’s revisionist western follows a farmer drawn into violence after the destruction of his family. Its revenge framework gradually becomes a story about chosen community, displacement, and the possibility of refusing endless retaliation. Eastwood’s laconic style is balanced by an ensemble of outsiders who turn the solitary gunfighter myth into something more humane.
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Carrie (1976) — Brian De Palma
De Palma adapts Stephen King into a horror film about bullying, religious repression, adolescence, and explosive revenge. Split screens, slow motion, subjective camera, and elaborate movement turn humiliation into spectacle. Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie give the film its emotional complexity, ensuring that supernatural terror grows from recognizable cruelty rather than appearing from nowhere.
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The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) — Nicolas Roeg
David Bowie plays an alien entrepreneur whose attempt to save his home planet becomes entangled with corporate power, addiction, loneliness, and human desire. Roeg fragments chronology and perspective, making the character’s alienation formal as well as thematic. The film is an elusive science-fiction parable about technology’s promise and the systems that absorb it.
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Garm Hava (1974) — M. S. Sathyu
Set around the Partition of India, Garm Hava follows a Muslim family in Agra confronting migration, economic collapse, and the pressure to leave home. Its restrained realism avoids reducing history to spectacle. The film’s power lies in showing how political borders become intimate crises involving work, property, marriage, memory, and belonging.
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Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) — Steven Spielberg
Spielberg approaches alien contact as spiritual wonder rather than invasion. Light, sound, gesture, and musical communication carry the film toward an encounter that is mysterious but emotionally legible. Its domestic conflicts complicate the wonder: the desire to answer a cosmic call may also mean abandoning responsibilities on Earth.
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Saturday Night Fever (1977) — John Badham
Badham’s disco drama is often remembered for its soundtrack and dance scenes, but its sharper subject is class limitation, masculinity, race, sexuality, and the fantasy of escape. Tony’s weekend persona cannot resolve the pressures of his neighborhood and family. The film helped make disco a global cinematic language while retaining a surprisingly bleak social undercurrent.
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Providence (1977) — Alain Resnais
Resnais constructs a shifting world in which an aging writer imagines, revises, and stages scenes involving his family. Fiction, memory, resentment, and bodily decline continually change places. The film’s elaborate artifice is its subject: it asks how authorship can become a form of control and how characters escape the stories imposed on them.
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That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) — Luis Buñuel
Buñuel casts two actors as the same woman in a final provocation about desire and possession. A wealthy man repeatedly narrates his frustration while political violence and surreal interruptions unsettle his romantic story. The device makes desire visibly unstable, exposing the gap between the woman imagined by a man and the person who refuses his control.
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Girlfriends (1978) — Claudia Weill
Weill’s perceptive independent film follows a photographer negotiating work, friendship, romance, and the expectations placed on women in New York. Melanie Mayron’s performance gives the protagonist an appealing mixture of anxiety and determination. Its modest scale is part of its importance: professional ambition and female friendship are treated as central dramatic subjects rather than side plots.
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Dersu Uzala (1975) — Akira Kurosawa
Kurosawa’s Siberian adventure follows a Russian surveyor and Dersu, a hunter whose knowledge of the landscape challenges the officer’s assumptions about civilization. Expansive nature photography supports a deeply human story of friendship, aging, and displacement. The film’s tenderness is balanced by its recognition that modern development can erase ways of living it does not understand.
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Mad Max (1979) — George Miller
Miller’s lean Australian action film turns a collapsing social order and a devastated highway into a kinetic revenge narrative. Its practical stunts, stark production design, and economy of exposition created a durable post-apocalyptic vocabulary. The film’s influence is immense, but its original force comes from making speed, machinery, and grief feel physically inseparable.
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Life of Brian (1979) — Terry Jones
Monty Python’s historical satire follows an ordinary man repeatedly mistaken for a messianic figure. Its targets include dogmatism, factional politics, imperial authority, and the human hunger for certainty. The comedy’s religious controversy should not obscure its broader achievement: it uses absurdity to show how institutions manufacture meaning and obedience.
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Being There (1979) — Hal Ashby
Peter Sellers plays Chance, a sheltered gardener whose simple statements are interpreted as profound political wisdom. Ashby’s calm direction lets the satire emerge from the gap between what Chance means and what powerful people want to hear. The film remains an incisive study of television, elite projection, image-making, and the accidental manufacture of authority.
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The Chess Players (1977) — Satyajit Ray
Ray’s historical drama follows two aristocrats absorbed in chess as British power takes control of Awadh. Their private obsession becomes a metaphor for elite detachment, while the film balances comedy, colonial history, and political tragedy. Ray’s humane irony avoids turning the characters into simple villains, showing instead how privilege can become a form of paralysis.
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My Brilliant Career (1979) — Gillian Armstrong
Armstrong’s adaptation of Miles Franklin follows a young Australian woman determined to become a writer rather than accept the domestic future expected of her. Judy Davis gives Sybylla fierce intelligence and contradiction. The film’s period setting does not make its conflict remote: artistic ambition, economic independence, romance, and female self-definition remain tightly connected.
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Five ways to begin watching
1. Start with American New Hollywood
Try The Godfather, Taxi Driver, Chinatown, Nashville, Dog Day Afternoon, and McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Together they show that New Hollywood was not one style: it included crime epics, psychological studies, ensemble satire, urban realism, and revisionist westerns.
2. Move into international art cinema
Begin with Mirror, Stalker, The Spirit of the Beehive, The Travelling Players, Cries and Whispers, and The Tree of Wooden Clogs. These films ask viewers to experience time, memory, landscape, and silence differently from conventional plot-driven cinema.
3. Follow political cinema across borders
Pair Xala, Touki Bouki, Garm Hava, Harlan County USA, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, and All the President’s Men. Their subjects range from colonialism and Partition to labor, journalism, and Indigenous dispossession.
4. Explore horror and science fiction
A strong route is The Exorcist, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Suspiria, Halloween, Dawn of the Dead, Alien, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The decade’s genre films were not peripheral to film history; they changed editing, sound, design, distribution, and audience expectations.
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Choose Wanda, Killer of Sheep, Girlfriends, The Ascent, The Chess Players, and My Brilliant Career. These films broaden the decade’s story through working-class, female, Black, Indigenous, South Asian, and Soviet perspectives.
Where to find these films
Availability changes by country, platform, rights holder, and date, so no streaming service should be assumed to carry a particular title indefinitely. For physical media, the useful search phrase is 1970s classic movies Blu-ray. Before buying an individual release, check the exact edition, region, subtitle options, restoration, disc format, and seller; a generic decade collection will not contain every film on this list.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best movie of the 1970s?
This editorial ranking places Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather first, with Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman close behind. The choice is not objective: it reflects a balance of critical esteem, influence, historical importance, and global range.
Why is Jeanne Dielman ranked so highly?
Akerman’s 1975 film radically expands what a movie can treat as dramatic material. Its attention to domestic labor, duration, repetition, female experience, and formal precision also reflects the way the critical canon has broadened. Its number-one position in the 2022 Sight and Sound critics’ poll is an important part of that conversation.
Are all of these films from Hollywood?
No. The list includes films from the United States, Belgium, France, the USSR, Italy, Spain, West Germany, Sweden, Greece, Japan, India, Senegal, Australia, and other filmmaking cultures. Hollywood and New Hollywood are important parts of the decade, but they are not the whole decade.
Does a film’s Oscar or National Film Registry status determine its ranking here?
No. Awards indicate recognition in a particular historical context, while National Film Registry inclusion concerns preservation and cultural, historical, or aesthetic significance in the United States. Neither distinction automatically establishes a worldwide ranking.
What year convention does this list use?
The list uses feature-release years from 1970 through 1979, generally following first feature release. Festival premieres, domestic theatrical releases, restorations, and regional release histories can produce different dates, so individual titles should be checked when precise archival dating matters.
The Bottom Line
The 1970s produced no single cinematic style and no single authoritative canon. The most rewarding way to use this ranking is as a map: begin with the landmark films you know, then follow it toward international cinema, documentary, horror, experimental work, and filmmakers whose contributions were historically overlooked.
Quick Recap
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