The Best Movies of the 1970s
The 1970s ranked by our composite score across 20+ authoritative lists, awards and polls — not one critic's opinion, but the weight of the whole canon.
The Godfather (1972) leads with a composite score of 8.37.
- 1The Godfather1972 · Francis Ford Coppola8.37
Oscar Best Picture winner 1972 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #3 · AFI 100 (2007) #2
- 2Taxi Driver1976 · Martin Scorsese7.30
Palme d'Or winner 1976 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1976 #1 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1976
- 3Apocalypse Now1979 · Francis Ford Coppola7.15
Palme d'Or winner 1979 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1979 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #18
- 4One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest1975 · Miloš Forman7.13
Oscar Best Picture winner 1975 · BAFTA Best Film winner 1976 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1976 #2
- 5The Godfather Part II1974 · Francis Ford Coppola6.10
Oscar Best Picture winner 1974 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #26 · Letterboxd Top 250 #8
- 6MASH1970 · Robert Altman5.29
Palme d'Or winner 1970 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1970 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1970 #5
- 7Annie Hall1977 · Woody Allen4.89
Oscar Best Picture winner 1977 · AFI 100 (2007) #35 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #243
- 8All That Jazz1979 · Bob Fosse4.82
Palme d'Or winner 1980 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1979 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1980 #8
- 9Rocky1976 · John G. Avildsen4.81
Oscar Best Picture winner 1976 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1977 #1 · AFI 100 (2007) #57
- 10The Conversation1974 · Francis Ford Coppola4.75
Palme d'Or winner 1974 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1974 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #72
- 11The Deer Hunter1978 · Michael Cimino4.70
Oscar Best Picture winner 1978 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1979 #3 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #211
- 12Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles1975 · Chantal Akerman4.65
Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #1 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #4 · Letterboxd Top 250 #210
- 13The Working Class Goes to Heaven1971 · Elio Petri4.50
Palme d'Or winner 1972 · Cannes Grand Prix winner null
- 14The French Connection1971 · William Friedkin4.24
Oscar Best Picture winner 1971 · AFI 100 (2007) #93 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1972 #10
- 15The Tin Drum1979 · Volker Schlöndorff4.16
Palme d'Or winner 1979 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1981 #1 · Criterion Collection spine #234
- 16The Tree of Wooden Clogs1978 · Ermanno Olmi4.01
Palme d'Or winner 1978 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1979 #2 · Vatican film list
- 17Scarecrow1973 · Jerry Schatzberg4.00
Palme d'Or winner 1973 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1973 #1
- 18Kramer vs. Kramer1979 · Robert Benton4.00
Oscar Best Picture winner 1979 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1980 #1
- 19The Sting1973 · George Roy Hill3.66
Oscar Best Picture winner 1973 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1974 #4 · National Film Registry (inducted 2005)
- 20Patton1970 · Franklin J. Schaffner3.59
Oscar Best Picture winner 1970 · AFI 100 (1998) #89 · National Film Registry (inducted 2003)
- 21Julia1977 · Fred Zinnemann3.53
BAFTA Best Film winner 1979 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1977 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1978 #2
- 22Padre Padrone1977 · Paolo Taviani, Vittorio Taviani3.47
Palme d'Or winner 1977 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1982 #10 · Kurosawa's 100 favorite films
- 23Barry Lyndon1975 · Stanley Kubrick3.41
Oscar Best Picture nominee 1975 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #12 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #45
- 24The Ascent1977 · Larisa Shepitko3.36
Berlin Golden Bear winner 1977 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #72 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #128
- 25The Last Picture Show1971 · Peter Bogdanovich3.33
Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1972 #1 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1971 · BAFTA Best Film nominee 1973
- 26The Mattei Affair1972 · Francesco Rosi3.32
Palme d'Or winner 1972 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1974 #8
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- 28Chinatown1974 · Roman Polanski3.16
Oscar Best Picture nominee 1974 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #72 · AFI 100 (2007) #21
- 29Jaws1975 · Steven Spielberg3.11
Oscar Best Picture nominee 1975 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #62 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #104
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New Hollywood's high tide
No decade is more heavily represented at the top of all-time lists than the 1970s, and the reason is structural, not nostalgic. The studio system's financial collapse at the end of the 1960s left executives genuinely unsure what audiences wanted, and for roughly a decade they resolved that uncertainty by betting on directors. The result was an American cinema of unusual autonomy: Coppola making a three-hour crime epic with unhurried pacing and murky lighting (The Godfather, 1972), then somehow exceeding it with a sequel; Polanski and Robert Towne perfecting the noir screenplay in Chinatown; Scorsese putting an unwatchable-in-theory character study (Taxi Driver) into theaters with a Palme d'Or attached; Forman sweeping the Oscars with an anti-institutional parable (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, 1975 — the first film in four decades to win all five major Academy Awards).
The other engine of the decade was the arrival of the film-school generation and its double invention: the modern blockbuster. Jaws (1975) created the wide-release summer event film; Star Wars (1977) industrialized it. It's fashionable to blame those two films for ending New Hollywood, but the canon treats them as part of it — they are director-driven, formally precise films that happened to be enormous. The decade closes with Apocalypse Now (1979), a production so unhinged it functions as the era's own myth: total directorial freedom pursued to the edge of catastrophe, and one more Palme d'Or to show for it.
Beyond the American story
The 1970s canon is American-heavy but not American-only. Kubrick, working from England, produced A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon — the latter dismissed by many in 1975 and now among his highest-ranked films in critics' polls, one of the clearest examples of how canonical standing shifts over decades. Spain, in the last years of Franco, produced Víctor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), an allegory so delicate the censors missed it, now a fixture of the international polls. German cinema was rebuilding through Herzog, Fassbinder and Wenders; the canon's memory of that movement mostly lands in lists just outside this page's cutoff.
Reading the composite scores, notice how the decade's top films dominate multiple source families at once — big on critics' polls and institutional canons and awards. That triple consensus is rare (most decades split their memory between the academies and the critics), and it is why, in any cross-list measurement, the 1970s reads as the deepest bench in film history.