The 23 Best Movies of the 1970s
Consider these films a starting point for getting into great films from the 1970s. After watching them, you’ll almost certainly want to explore more movies from this dynamic decade.
1. Don’t Look Now (1973)
Directed by Nicolas Roeg (Walkabout, The Man Who Fell to Earth, The Witches), this drama-horror film focuses on a couple (Julie Christie, Donald Sutherland) who recently lost a child. During a trip to Venice, they meet a pair of weird sisters who offer a sinister warning from beyond the grave.
A persistent rumor holds that during a highly personal scene, Sutherland and Christie really were getting intimate. In a 2015 Daily Mail interview, Christie hinted that the rumor might be true; Sutherland denied it.
2. Jaws (1975)
Jaws has it all: a great cast, adventure, and a shark whose first appearance is divinely understated. Steven Spielberg directs Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, and Robert Shaw as the three guys tasked with catching the big fish.
Fun film fact: The classic line, “We’re gonna need a bigger boat,” was ad-libbed by Scheider.
3. Taxi Driver (1976)
A mentally unstable vet (Robert De Niro) drives a cab amid decadence and crime in New York City. Martin Scorsese directs this neo-noir drama, which also stars Jodie Foster, Harvey Keitel, Cybill Shepherd, Peter Boyle, and Albert Brooks.
If you’re unfamiliar with Manhattan’s’ 70s-era sleaziness, Taxi Driver will be a rough watch.
4. The Deer Hunter (1978)
This searing drama focuses on how the Vietnam War affects a trio of young Pennsylvania steelworkers (Robert DeNiro, John Savage, and Christopher Walken) who come back from Vietnam with PTSD. The Deer Hunter was nominated for nine Academy Awards and won five, including Best Picture.
The American Film Institute put the movie at No. 53 in its “100 Years, 100 Movies” list.
5. Chinatown (1974)
In 1930s Los Angeles, a private investigator (Jack Nicholson) is hired to get the dirt on a philandering husband. But since this is a film noir directed by Roman Polanski, you know that’s just the first layer of the plot.
Water rights, shady real estate deals, double-crossings, and other sleazy doings are gradually uncovered until a genuinely shocking secret is revealed. “This film is flawless,” says Philip French of The Guardian.
6. Sounder (1972)
During the Depression, a Black sharecropper, Nathan Lee Morgan (Paul Winfield), steals a ham to feed his family and is sent to prison for one year. His wife (Cicely Tyson) and children must survive the best they can while trying to find Nathan as he’s shipped between prison camps.
Roger Ebert called Sounder “one of the most compassionate and truthful of movies,” adding that “there’s not a level where it doesn’t succeed completely.”
7. Network (1976)
Paddy Chayefsky’s script seems familiar, somehow, with its bombastic and mentally disturbed anchorman (Peter Finch) and an icy yet equally depraved network executive (Faye Dunaway) who will stop at nothing to dominate the airwaves. Sidney Lumet directs an outstanding cast, including William Holden, Ned Beatty, and Robert Duvall.
Fun film fact: Beatrice Straight won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress despite only being on screen for five minutes and two seconds.
8. Slap Shot (1977)
Paul Newman plays a Rust Belt minor league hockey player-coach who comes up with a trick to fill the arena: Hire players who like to fight. It works.
The George Roy Hill film may be one of the raunchiest, most violent sports movies of all time – and one of the funniest if you don’t mind crude language or bloodshed.
9. Badlands (1973)
Teenage killers no longer have the power to shock. But in the late 1950s, the story of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate terrified the nation with a heartland murder spree that ultimately claimed 10 victims.
Terrence Malick (Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line) directs Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek in a fictionalized version of this true-crime story. Malick uses the South Dakota landscape as a third character.
10. Cabaret (1972)
Bob Fosse directs Liza Minnelli in a drama set in a seedy Berlin nightclub. She plays a club entertainer involved with two men, enjoying the bohemian lifestyle. At the same time, poverty, unemployment, and political clashes swirl outside, foretelling the rise of the German era.
The Guardian calls the musical both “divinely decadent” and “chillingly relevant.”
11. Saturday Night Fever (1977)
The uninitiated might consider this a glittery Valentine to the disco era. But most of the movie is pretty bleak. According to Rolling Stone: “It’s really a coming-of-age story about a guy outgrowing his knucklehead friends, his neighborhood, and his own limited set of options.”
John Travolta plays a Brooklyn mope who sells paint by day and lives for nights at the local disco.
12. Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974)
Ellen Burstyn plays a widow with a young son who decides to pursue her dream of becoming a singer. The New York Times called it “a clear-eyed, tough-talking, often boisterously funny movie about women and men, seen from the point of view of a woman.”
Martin Scorsese directs an excellent cast, including Kris Kristofferson, Diane Ladd, Harvey Keitel, Jodie Foster, and Laura Dern.
13. The Godfather (1972)
There’s a reason this film and its 1974 sequel will always land on “best movies of all time” lists. It is because Francis Ford Coppola is a brilliant director, and Marlon Brando is extraordinary as a mob boss. Love it or hate it, you have to admit that this is primo storytelling.
Al Pacino, Diane Keaton, Robert Duvall, and James Caan are standouts in the movie, which won Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Actor (Brando), and Best Adapted Screenplay.
14. An Unmarried Woman (1978)
Jill Clayburgh plays the title role of a Manhattan wife and mother whose husband (Michael Murphy) leaves her for a younger woman. She learns to survive and apply what she’s learned to the possibility of love again – but on her own terms.
Film critic Roger Ebert called her performance “luminous.”
15. Eraserhead (1977)
A very early and very surreal David Lynch movie, Eraserhead depicts the life of a man (Jack Nance) who’s losing his grip living in an industrial world with a furious partner and their mutant baby.
Nance went on to work on most of Lynch’s projects, including the TV show Twin Peaks.
16. American Graffiti (1973)
A movie about early 1960s teens driving around in cars. What’s so special about that? Everything, according to Roger Ebert. He called American Graffiti “not only a great movie but a brilliant work of historical fiction; no sociological treatise could duplicate the movie’s success in remembering exactly how it was to be alive at that cultural instant.”
The up-and-coming cast includes Richard Dreyfuss, Charles Martin Smith, Harrison Ford, Cindy Williams, Ron Howard, Mackenzie Phillips, and Wolfman Jack.
17. Harlan County USA (1976)
It took documentary filmmaker Barbara Kopple four years to make this masterpiece, which focuses on a Kentucky coal mining strike. Kopple displayed the hardscrabble lives of 180 miners and their families, who went without basic necessities. At the same time, the power company’s profit increased by leaps and bounds.
Rolling Stone called the documentary “as gripping as a thriller,” as well as “a masterclass in bringing audiences into (the) subjects’ lives.” Kopple won a Best Documentary Oscar for her work.
18. Young Frankenstein (1974)
Mel Brooks turned the horror genre on its ear. Gene Wilder plays the great-grandson of the mad scientist, Marty Feldman as his wide-eyed assistant, and Peter Boyle as the spare-parts monster with zippers in his neck instead of stitches.
Cloris Leachman’s performance as the housekeeper truly frightens the horses, and Madeline Kahn and Teri Garr turn in hilarious performances as the women in Dr. Frankenstein’s life. You’ll never look at the song “Puttin’ on the Ritz” the same way again.
19. Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
This drama stars Al Pacino as a bank robber in a hostage situation. It won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.
Roger Ebert called it a movie “made brilliant by its deeply seen characters” and praised director Sidney Lumet for not exploiting its seedier plotlines for cheap laughs. Dog Day Afternoon was selected for the National Film Registry in 2009 as “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.”
20. Nashville (1975)
Robert Altman is known for long, elaborate films with crisscrossing plots, realistic dialogue, and an often subversive viewpoint. Set in the country-gospel music world, Nashville has 24 main characters and runs for two hours and 40 minutes—yet somehow, it doesn’t seem long.
Its ensemble cast includes Ned Beatty, Keith Carradine, Shelley Duvall, Karen Black, Jeff Goldblum, Lily Tomlin, Scott Glenn, and Michael Murphy.
21. Apocalypse Now (1979)
Francis Ford Coppola and Marlon Brando reunite for this horrifying epic about a U.S. Army officer (Martin Sheen) who’s sent to kill a mentally deranged renegade colonel (Brando).
The National Review called it “the greatest war movie ever made.” The film also gave us that memorable phrase, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”
22. Shampoo (1975)
A freewheeling hairdresser (Warren Beatty) has access to as many beautiful women as he wants. Naturally, there are complications. Shampoo won the Best Screenplay award from the National Society of Film Critics, and Lee Grant won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.
Fun film fact: Shampoo was Carrie Fisher’s film debut.
23. Mean Streets (1973)
Martin Scorsese’s crime masterpiece pairs Harvey Keitel and Robert DeNiro as friends struggling to navigate life in New York’s Little Italy neighborhood. Critics universally praised this film’s intense acting and New York realism.
De Niro won Best Supporting Actor awards from the National Society of Film Critics and the New York Film Critics Circle.
