The best movies of the 1970s range from intimate, formally daring portraits to crime epics, horror, science fiction and international classics. This is an editorial ranking—not an official canon—based on artistic force, influence, craft, distinctiveness and the breadth of film cultures and genres represented. The order is debatable; the point is to show why each film merits a place on your watchlist.
How to read this ranking
The decade’s cinema cannot be reduced to one American style. New Hollywood’s location shooting, existential concerns and looser storytelling sit alongside international, experimental and genre films. The British Film Institute’s 1970s collection reflects that range. Its 2022 Sight and Sound critics’ poll, with more than 1,600 voters and over 4,000 films receiving votes, is evidence of an ongoing critical conversation—not proof that any particular ranking is objective. The BFI has also noted that canons should be challenged and reframed.
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The list balances lasting recognition and formal ambition with variety in pace, accessibility, mood and national cinema. A brisk thriller and a deliberately patient experimental film are not competing on speed alone. These placements are this article’s editorial choices, not a reproduction of the BFI poll.
30 best movies of the 1970s, ranked
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The Godfather (1972)
Francis Ford Coppola turns a crime-family saga into a study of inheritance, loyalty and the price of power. Its controlled storytelling makes it an accessible gateway to the decade, while its moral unease gives it lasting depth. It ranked 12th in the BFI’s 2022 critics’ poll.
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The Godfather Part II (1974)
Coppola broadens the first film’s portrait of family and power, moving between the making of a dynasty and its increasingly corrosive legacy. It is both an ambitious sequel and a film with its own tragic architecture.
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Apocalypse Now (1979)
Coppola’s Vietnam War odyssey grows stranger and more hallucinatory as it travels upriver. Its scale and formal ambition make it gripping, but its dreamlike, disorienting descent is not conventional battlefield drama. It ranked 19th in the BFI’s 2022 critics’ poll.
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Taxi Driver (1976)
Martin Scorsese’s portrait of a lonely New York cabdriver is abrasive, subjective and increasingly unsettling. Rather than offering a comfortable hero, it makes the viewer sit inside a mind that is losing its grip.
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Chinatown (1974)
Roman Polanski’s neo-noir pairs a private investigation with a larger story of corruption and control. Its classical detective setup leads into a modern, bleak vision of how power protects itself.
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Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)
Chantal Akerman builds a radical drama from the repeated domestic routines of a Belgian widow. Patient duration and attention to everyday labor become the film’s form and its argument. It topped the BFI’s 2022 Sight and Sound critics’ poll, a notable sign of how critical canons can change.
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Barry Lyndon (1975)
Stanley Kubrick’s historical epic is composed with extraordinary precision, turning landscape, candlelight and social ceremony into part of the storytelling. Its measured pace suits a world in which status and fortune can change without making its characters masters of their fate.
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Nashville (1975)
Robert Altman’s sprawling ensemble film follows intersecting lives around country music and political spectacle. Its shifting focus captures a culture through many imperfect voices rather than one central protagonist.
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Stalker (1979)
Andrei Tarkovsky’s science-fiction journey through the forbidden Zone is less about futuristic machinery than faith, desire and uncertainty. Its slow, meditative pace rewards viewers willing to dwell in atmosphere and ambiguity.
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Mirror (1975)
Tarkovsky assembles memory, dream and history into an associative, autobiographical film rather than a straightforward narrative. It is one of the decade’s most personal experiments in cinematic form.
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A Clockwork Orange (1971)
Kubrick’s dystopian satire is provocative in its stylized violence and its questions about behavior, punishment and choice. It remains a challenging watch rather than an easy crowd-pleaser.
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Annie Hall (1977)
Woody Allen’s romantic comedy reshapes a familiar breakup story with direct address, fractured chronology and comic formal detours. Its influence is visible in how freely it lets thought and memory interrupt the plot.
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Killer of Sheep (1977)
Charles Burnett’s intimate independent film observes a Black Los Angeles family with quiet attention to work, fatigue and small pleasures. Its episodic, unhurried approach offers a counterpoint to the decade’s grand studio narratives.
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The Deer Hunter (1978)
Michael Cimino’s war drama follows friends from a Pennsylvania steel town into the trauma of Vietnam and back. Its focus on community and psychological damage makes it a sobering counterpoint to the feverish odyssey of Apocalypse Now.
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One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)
Milos Forman’s institutional drama sets a forceful performance by Jack Nicholson against a ward governed by rigid authority. The film’s conflict is emotionally direct, while its portrait of control gives the story a lasting edge.
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Badlands (1973)
Terrence Malick’s spare road film follows two young people through violence and flight. Its lyrical distance from its characters makes the story unsettling: beauty and moral clarity do not arrive together.
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Mean Streets (1973)
Scorsese’s early portrait of New York life is raw, energetic and rooted in the tensions of friendship, faith and neighborhood loyalty. Its restless style announces a distinctive voice without smoothing away the characters’ flaws.
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The Last Picture Show (1971)
Peter Bogdanovich’s black-and-white drama watches a small Texas town and its young people drift toward an uncertain future. Its understated character work gives the town’s decline a personal, rather than merely nostalgic, weight.
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Jaws (1975)
Steven Spielberg’s coastal thriller turns a simple, legible threat into mounting suspense and a vivid portrait of a community in denial. Its popular storytelling is a major part of its achievement, not a reason to discount it.
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Network (1976)
Sidney Lumet’s angry satire follows television’s appetite for spectacle to an absurd extreme. Its sharp theatricality and media-industry setting make the film feel both rooted in its period and pointed beyond it.
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The Conformist (1970)
Bernardo Bertolucci’s Italian political drama follows a man seeking safety through conformity under fascism. Its striking visual design gives the story of private compromise a chilling public scale.
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Wanda (1970)
Barbara Loden’s independent character study centers a woman adrift in a world that offers her few good choices. Its stark, unvarnished approach makes it a vital counterweight to the decade’s more polished studio films.
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Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972)
Werner Herzog’s feverish historical journey follows a doomed expedition into the Amazon. The landscape and the expedition’s growing madness merge into a hypnotic, disturbing vision of ambition.
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Cries and Whispers (1972)
Ingmar Bergman’s chamber drama concentrates on sisters, illness and unresolved emotional pain. Its intense performances and carefully controlled visual world make it powerful, though emotionally demanding.
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Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974)
Jacques Rivette’s playful French film turns friendship, performance and a mysterious house into an open-ended game. Its length and digressive pleasure are part of the invitation: it is a film to explore, not simply decode.
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The Spirit of the Beehive (1973)
Víctor Erice’s Spanish coming-of-age film sees the aftermath of war through a child’s imagination and an evocative rural world. Its quietness and uncertainty give it the quality of a memory taking shape.
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The Ascent (1977)
Larisa Shepitko’s Soviet war film follows two partisans through a winter landscape and a series of moral tests. Its rigorous visual approach and spiritual seriousness distinguish it from more action-driven war stories.
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Suspiria (1977)
Dario Argento’s Italian horror film makes color, sound and stylized violence central to its effect. Story logic takes a back seat to sensory unease, making it a strong pick for viewers who want horror as visual spectacle.
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House (Hausu) (1977)
Nobuhiko Obayashi’s Japanese horror-comedy turns a haunted house into a surreal collage of abrupt edits, playful effects and bizarre threats. Its deliberate unreality makes it unlike conventional haunted-house fare.
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The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978)
Ermanno Olmi’s Italian ensemble film observes rural life at the end of the nineteenth century with patient, documentary-like attention. Its modest scale and communal focus provide a quiet alternative to the decade’s urban dramas and spectacles.
What makes the decade’s canon worth revisiting?
Institutional polls are useful snapshots of taste, not final verdicts. The BFI says Sight and Sound’s poll began in 1952 and is held once a decade; in 2022, almost 600 filmmakers also took part in its directors’ poll. The critics’ poll placed The Godfather at 12 and Apocalypse Now at 19, while also recognizing films as different as Taxi Driver, Mirror, Stalker, Barry Lyndon and Killer of Sheep. That range is a reminder that the decade’s achievements are not confined to one genre or national industry.
American Film Institute lists can add context for US cinema and genre, but they are not a global ranking of 1970s films. For a wider view, the BFI’s decade collection is a useful starting point. Neither institution turns a ranked list into a universal answer: the most rewarding choice depends on whether you want a crime epic, formal experiment, intimate character study, political drama or genre thrill.
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