The Godfather
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
1972
The summit of the American crime film: Coppola turned an immigrant family's rise and rot into the country's own epic, and made damnation look like a coronation.
★ 10.0
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1970s
1970 – 1979
Showing 85 films from the 1970s
The Godfather: Part II
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
1974
Coppola did what almost nobody manages, and made a sequel with a real claim to surpassing the original: two eras of one family run side by side, and the colder one wins.
★ 9.8
Apocalypse Now
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
1979
No production has ever gone further off the rails or shown it more clearly: Coppola's Vietnam abandons the war film for pure hallucination, and the helicopters over the trees are permanent.
★ 9.7
Taxi Driver
Directed by Martin Scorsese
1976
Travis Bickle escaped the picture and entered the language: Scorsese and De Niro made a lonely man's interior so exact that it stopped being about one man at all.
★ 9.6
Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope
Directed by George Lucas
1977
Modern Hollywood begins here: Lucas told the oldest story there is inside a universe that looked used and lived in, and the blockbuster has run the business ever since.
★ 9.5
Chinatown
Directed by Roman Polanski
1974
Screenwriters still take this one apart scene by scene to see how it works: Towne and Polanski built a mystery about stolen water that ends without a shred of mercy.
★ 9.4
Jaws
Directed by Steven Spielberg
1975
Summer blockbusters start here: the mechanical shark kept breaking, so Spielberg hid it, and accidentally proved that what you cannot see is worse than what you can.
★ 9.2
Alien
Directed by Ridley Scott
1979
Giger's creature is still the most frightening thing anyone has designed for a screen: Scott fused haunted house and space opera, and put a woman at the center of both.
★ 9.0
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Directed by Milos Forman
1975
Nicholson against Nurse Ratched is the great screen battle of wills: a convict fakes insanity to serve his time in a hospital, and finds the ward already has a ruler.
★ 9.0
Annie Hall
Directed by Woody Allen
1977
The romantic comedy has never recovered from it: Allen talks to the camera, walks into his own memories, drops subtitles over small talk, and breaks every rule the form had.
★ 8.8
A Clockwork Orange
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
1971
Kubrick pulled it from British cinemas himself after the reaction, and it stayed unavailable there for twenty-seven years: a state that enforces goodness, an invented slang, imagery nobody forgets.
★ 8.7
The Exorcist
Directed by William Friedkin
1973
Still the one people watch with the lights on fifty years later: Friedkin shot a possession story like a documentary, and the restraint is what makes it unbearable.
★ 8.6
Barry Lyndon
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
1975
Cinematographers still study every frame: Kubrick lit interiors by candlelight alone using lenses built for NASA, and the result looks like walking through a gallery of paintings.
★ 8.4
Stalker
Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky
1979
Nothing else in cinema moves this slowly and holds this completely: Tarkovsky walks three men into a forbidden zone for nearly three hours, and almost nothing happens.
★ 8.3
Network
Directed by Sidney Lumet
1976
Written as satire in 1976 and now indistinguishable from television: Chayefsky imagined a network that would put a man's breakdown on air for ratings, and got everything right.
★ 8.2
Dog Day Afternoon
Directed by Sidney Lumet
1975
Pacino turned a real 1972 Brooklyn robbery into the most electric performance of the seventies: a bank job collapses in ten minutes and becomes a street carnival.
★ 8.0
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Directed by Steven Spielberg
1977
Spielberg made the rare first-contact film that treats the aliens as something to hope for: an ordinary man starts building a mountain in his living room and cannot say why.
★ 8.0
The Deer Hunter
Directed by Michael Cimino
1978
Cimino spends a whole first act on a steel town and a wedding, so that when the war arrives it lands on people you already know by name.
★ 8.0
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Directed by Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones
1975 · United Kingdom
No comedy has been quoted more relentlessly for fifty years: the Pythons could not afford horses, banged coconuts instead, and turned the budget problem into the joke.
★ 7.9
All the President's Men
Directed by Alan J. Pakula
1976
Every journalism film gets held up against this one: two reporters chase Watergate through phone calls and parking garages, and verifying a single fact becomes unbearably tense.
★ 7.9
Manhattan
Directed by Woody Allen
1979
It opens with the best love letter any city has received: Gershwin over black and white Manhattan, and then two hours of people ruining their lives beautifully.
★ 7.9
Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Directed by Werner Herzog
1972
Herzog shot it for almost nothing on a real Amazon river with a lead actor he fought with constantly: Kinski's stare and a shrinking raft do everything.
★ 7.7
Badlands
Directed by Terrence Malick
1973
Malick's first film, and the model for every young couple on a killing spree since: the girl narrates it in the flat voice of a magazine horoscope.
★ 7.7
Monty Python's Life of Brian
Directed by Terry Jones
1979 · United Kingdom
Councils across Britain banned it and Norway would not show it at all: the Pythons went after zealotry rather than faith, which is exactly why it still works.
★ 7.7
The Conversation
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
1974
Written years before Watergate and released at its climax, it looked like prophecy: a surveillance expert starts hearing something terrible inside his own recording, and his paranoia does the rest.
★ 7.7
The French Connection
Directed by William Friedkin
1971
It made the car chase in Bullitt look choreographed: this one was shot without permits, at ninety miles an hour, through real Brooklyn traffic that nobody had cleared.
★ 7.6
Young Frankenstein
Directed by Mel Brooks
1974
Brooks has called it his best film and he shot it using the original 1931 laboratory equipment: black and white, played completely straight, and funnier for the discipline.
★ 7.6
Nashville
Directed by Robert Altman
1975
Altman's method arrives here fully formed: twenty-four characters, overlapping microphones, and five days of country music and politics that add up to a portrait of the whole country.
★ 7.5
The Last Picture Show
Directed by Peter Bogdanovich
1971
Bogdanovich insisted on monochrome in 1971, when absolutely nobody did that: a Texas town running out of reasons to exist, and the teenagers running out along with it.
★ 7.4
Mean Streets
Directed by Martin Scorsese
1973
Scorsese found his whole method here at thirty: Little Italy, Catholic guilt, a handheld camera and a jukebox that never stops, most of it shot in Los Angeles.
★ 7.3
American Graffiti
Directed by George Lucas
1973
One night of cruising in 1962, with the radio playing wall to wall from start to finish: Lucas caught an America that was about to stop existing.
★ 7.3
McCabe and Mrs. Miller
Directed by Robert Altman
1971
Altman made a western out of mud, snow and Leonard Cohen songs: a small-time gambler and a businesslike madam build a frontier town out of almost nothing.
★ 7.0
The Spirit of the Beehive
Directed by Victor Erice
1973
A small girl in Franco's Spain sees Frankenstein at a traveling cinema and decides the monster is real: almost nothing is said, and the silence is the point.
★ 7.0
The Sting
Directed by George Roy Hill
1973
The con is played on the audience as much as on the mark, and every turn is earned: Newman and Redford again, with ragtime that put Scott Joplin back on the charts.
★ 7.0
A Woman Under the Influence
Directed by John Cassavetes
1974
Cassavetes mortgaged his house to finance it, and Gena Rowlands gives the most exposed performance in American film: a marriage where love and damage cannot be separated.
★ 7.0
The Long Goodbye
Directed by Robert Altman
1973
Altman dropped Chandler's detective into 1973 Los Angeles and let him be completely out of step with it: Elliott Gould mumbles through a city that has stopped caring.
★ 7.0
Amarcord
Directed by Federico Fellini
1973 · Italy
Fellini remembering his own seaside town under Mussolini and admitting he is embroidering it: no plot at all, just a year of weather, sex, food and fascism.
★ 6.9
Blazing Saddles
Directed by Mel Brooks
1974
Brooks spent years saying it could not be made today and has since changed his mind: a Black sheriff arrives in a frontier town built on racism, and everybody gets hit.
★ 6.9
MASH
Directed by Robert Altman
1970
Altman's overlapping dialogue turns up fully formed: army surgeons in Korea behave appallingly in order to stay sane, and the film was really about Vietnam all along.
★ 6.8
Rocky
Directed by John G. Avildsen
1976
Stallone wrote it himself and would not sell the script unless he could star: a club fighter from Philadelphia is handed a title shot as a publicity stunt, and takes it completely seriously.
★ 6.8
The Last Waltz
Directed by Martin Scorsese
1978
A rock concert storyboarded like a feature and shot on 35mm by seven camera crews: The Band's 1976 farewell is the concert film everything else gets measured against.
★ 6.8
Deliverance
Directed by John Boorman
1972
The outdoors has never felt this hostile on film: Boorman shot in sequence and made his actors run the whitewater themselves, and a weekend canoe trip turns into something much older.
★ 6.6
Five Easy Pieces
Directed by Bob Rafelson
1970
The diner scene has outlived the film's whole era: a classical pianist walked away from his family to work oil rigs, and nobody here will explain him or forgive him.
★ 6.6
Patton
Directed by Franklin J. Schaffner
1970
Coppola co-wrote it before The Godfather and George C. Scott refused the Oscar: a monologue in front of an enormous flag opens the most ambivalent film Hollywood ever made about a general.
★ 6.5
Being There
Directed by Hal Ashby
1979
Peter Sellers chased this part for years and considered it the best work he ever did: a gardener who has only ever watched television is mistaken for a sage.
★ 6.5
The Outlaw Josey Wales
Directed by Clint Eastwood
1976
Eastwood fired the director and took over, and the union wrote a rule to stop it happening again: a Missouri farmer rides out after the war and keeps collecting strays he never wanted.
★ 6.5
Dirty Harry
Directed by Don Siegel
1971
Pauline Kael called it fascist and the argument has never really ended: Eastwood's inspector chases a Zodiac-like killer through San Francisco with a .44 Magnum and open contempt for procedure.
★ 6.4
Serpico
Directed by Sidney Lumet
1973
Frank Serpico was a real New York cop who would not take an envelope: Lumet films departmental corruption as an ordinary daily fact, and Pacino plays stubbornness as an entire personality.
★ 6.3
Animal House
Directed by John Landis
1978
Made for three million and returned more than a hundred: every campus comedy since is a footnote to it, and John Belushi carries whole scenes with almost no dialogue.
★ 6.2
Carrie
Directed by Brian De Palma
1976
Stephen King's first novel became this, and no adaptation since has been meaner: De Palma films high-school cruelty in slow motion and split screen, and the prom is a fifteen-minute held breath.
★ 6.2
Gimme Shelter
Directed by Albert Maysles and David Maysles
1970
The sixties end on camera here: the Maysles followed the Rolling Stones to a free concert at Altamont, then sat Mick Jagger at an editing bench and made him watch what happened.
★ 6.2
The Man Who Would Be King
Directed by John Huston
1975
Huston tried to make this for twenty years and finally got Connery and Caine: two British soldiers walk into Kafiristan intending to be crowned as gods, and the joke gets serious slowly.
★ 6.1
Superman
Directed by Richard Donner
1978
Warner promised audiences they would believe a man could fly, and they did: Christopher Reeve plays both halves so completely that a pair of glasses becomes a plausible disguise.
★ 6.1
Harold and Maude
Directed by Hal Ashby
1971
It failed on release and then ran 115 straight weeks at a single Minnesota theater: a death-obsessed teenager falls for a seventy-nine-year-old, and Cat Stevens scores the whole thing.
★ 6.0
Mad Max
Directed by George Miller
1979 · Australia
Made in Australia for four hundred thousand dollars and held a record for return on investment: George Miller was an emergency room doctor, and the crashes look like things he had seen.
★ 5.9
Woodstock
Directed by Michael Wadleigh
1970
Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker were on the editing crew, cutting three days of festival into split-screen: half a million people, no violence, and a mud field that became a permanent reference.
★ 5.8
The Mother and the Whore (La Maman et La Putain)
Directed by Jean Eustache
1973 · France
Nearly four hours of three people talking in Paris apartments, and nothing else defines what happened after 1968 so exactly: Eustache made it once and never made anything like it again.
★ 5.8
Paper Moon
Directed by Peter Bogdanovich
1973
Tatum O'Neal was ten and is still the youngest winner of a competitive Academy Award: a Depression-era orphan running a Bible scam alongside someone who may be her father.
★ 5.7
Breaking Away
Directed by Peter Yates
1979
No sports film is sweeter, and the sport barely matters: an Indiana teenager pretends to be Italian because he loves bicycle racing, and the town's class divide does the rest.
★ 5.7