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
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1979
Showing 112 works across all media from 1979
London Calling
1979 · From London Calling
Strummer borrowing the BBC's wartime call sign to announce the end of the world, and sounding thrilled about it.
★ 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
Rapper's Delight
1979
Big Bank Hank auditioned outside the pizzeria where he worked, rapping lines borrowed from Grandmaster Caz's notebook.
★ 9.0
Comfortably Numb
1979 · From The Wall
A tranquilizer shot before a 1977 Philadelphia show gave Waters the lyric; Gilmour brought the chords and the solo.
★ 8.9
London Calling
1979
Their producer motivated the sessions by swinging ladders around the studio and pouring wine into the piano. The sleeve copies Elvis's first album.
★ 8.8
The Wall
1979
Roger Waters got the idea after spitting at a fan in Montreal and being appalled at himself. A school near the studio supplied the children's choir.
★ 8.8
Off the Wall
1979
Jackson was twenty-one and wrote the two best songs on it himself. It won a single Grammy, which he took as an insult.
★ 8.5
Highway to Hell
1979
Bon Scott was dead six months after it came out. It was the first record they made with a producer who cared about choruses.
★ 8.3
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
Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough
1979 · From Off the Wall
Jackson wrote it himself and steered the session; a whisper, a water-bottle rattle, then Louis Johnson's bass takes over.
★ 8.3
Good Times
1979
Edwards' bassline turned up on Rapper's Delight within months; the settlement put Chic's names on rap's first pop hit.
★ 8.1
Highway to Hell
1979 · From Highway to Hell
Mutt Lange took over production, the band cut it in London in 1979, and America finally caught on.
★ 8.0
Another Brick in the Wall Part 2
1979 · From The Wall
Ezrin sent Gilmour to the discos, and twenty-three Islington schoolchildren got forty minutes to sing themselves onto a number one.
★ 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
Poems
1979 · 352 pages
Bishop looks at a fish, a filling station, a moose in the road, and never tells you what to feel. In "One Art" she calls losing things an art you can master.
★ 7.8
If on a winter's night a traveler
1979 · 260 pages
You buy a Calvino novel, the copy is faulty, and the hunt for the rest keeps dropping you into the opening chapter of some other book. Ten beginnings, each hard to leave.
★ 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
Rock With You
1979 · From Off the Wall
Rod Temperton offered it to Karen Carpenter first; Quincy Jones and Jackson took it to number one.
★ 7.6
New York, New York
1979 · From Trilogy: Past Present Future
De Niro called the first theme too weak, so Kander and Ebb wrote this one in anger.
★ 7.6