Best Movies of the 1970s

The New Hollywood decade. The Godfather, Taxi Driver, Apocalypse Now, Network — when Hollywood made adult films for adults at scale.

The 1970s is the decade most-often nominated as American cinema's greatest. It opens with the studio system in collapse and ends with the blockbuster era reorganising the industry around event films. In between, for about seven years, the major studios financed serious adult dramas at scale, and a generation of new directors — Coppola, Scorsese, Spielberg, Lucas, Friedkin, Polanski, Altman, De Palma, Schrader, Bogdanovich — made the films that have defined American cinema since.

Our ten picks for the decade.

The ten

  • The Godfather (1972) — Coppola. The most-canonised American film of the post-1960s era.
  • The Godfather Part II (1974) — Coppola again. The sequel that beat the original at the Oscars.
  • Apocalypse Now (1979) — Coppola's Vietnam epic. The production was the war.
  • Taxi Driver (1976) — Scorsese, Schrader, De Niro. The New York film.
  • Chinatown (1974) — Polanski. Robert Towne's screenplay is the most-studied since Citizen Kane.
  • Network (1976) — Sidney Lumet, Paddy Chayefsky. 'I'm mad as hell.'
  • Jaws (1975) — Spielberg. The film that invented the summer blockbuster.
  • Annie Hall (1977) — Woody Allen. Best Picture. The form-breaking romantic comedy.
  • Star Wars (1977) — George Lucas. The other film that invented the modern blockbuster.
  • The Conversation (1974) — Coppola again. Surveillance paranoia. Gene Hackman's quietest lead performance.

What changed in the decade

The Production Code, which had governed what American cinema could depict since the 1930s, was replaced by the MPAA ratings system in 1968. The 1970s was the first full decade in which American studios could produce R-rated dramas for adult audiences. Almost every film on this list would have been impossible under the old Code.

The decade also saw the studios swallowed by conglomerates — Paramount became part of Gulf+Western, Warner Bros. became part of Kinney National (later Warner Communications). The conglomerate model would, by the early 1980s, push the studios toward the franchise-driven model that has dominated cinema since.

The directors who came up in this decade — particularly Coppola, Scorsese, Spielberg, and Lucas — became the dominant American filmmakers of the next forty years. The aesthetic and structural innovations of the 1970s are still, in 2026, the foundation that mainstream American cinema is working from.