Many people consider the 1970s to be the greatest decade in movie history, and for good reason. In America, the collapse of the old studio system and the rise of New Hollywood meant filmmakers had unusual creative freedom, while audiences proved willing to embrace films that were darker and stranger than ever before.
Narrowing such an extraordinary decade down to just a few movies means leaving out plenty of masterpieces. Nevertheless, the titles below represent some of the era’s most daring, influential, entertaining, and unforgettable creations, all of which continue to influence the medium today.
8
‘Taxi Driver’ (1976)
<<img src="https://static0.colliderimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/taxi-driver-robert-de-niro.jpg?q=70&fit=crop&w=825&dpr=1" />
Image via Columbia Pictures</figure>
“You talkin’ to me?” Taxi Driver is deeply uncomfortable because it forces the viewer into Travis Bickle’s (Robert De Niro) head, making us understand how he sees the world. In the process, it laid the blueprint for countless twisted character studies to follow, though none has yet surpassed it. Guided by Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader, we follow the lonely Vietnam vet through nighttime New York as his insomnia, alienation, sexual frustration, and disgust gradually harden into fantasies of violence.
A big part of the movie’s greatness lies in its complexity and contradictions. Travis desperately wants connection but seems incapable of achieving it, and his later fixation on rescuing Iris (Jodie Foster) allows him to recast his destructive impulses as something heroic. In short, Travis correctly recognizes the ugliness around him, but is profoundly wrong about what it means and what should be done about it.
7
‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ (1975)
<<img src="https://static0.colliderimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/one-flew-over-the-cuckoo-s-nest-1975.jpg?q=49&fit=crop&w=825&dpr=2" />
Image via United Artists</figure>
“But I tried, didn’t I? Goddammit, at least I did that.” Here, Randle McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) gets himself transferred to a psychiatric hospital, only to come face-to-face with Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher), who exercises suffocating authority over the institution. She controls the ward through rules, medication, shame, and the calm insistence that everything being done is supposedly for the patients’ benefit.
McMurphy’s small rebellions therefore acquire enormous emotional weight, whether he’s organizing a basketball game, taking the patients fishing, or pretending to watch a baseball game on a TV that Ratched refuses to turn on. Rather than playing this as a cartoon or caricature, director Miloš Forman tells a genuinely touching and frequently uproarious story about freedom, one with hard-hitting political undertones. His movie bottled the counterculture spirit of its era.
- The first film not in the English language to win Best Picture, in the Academy’s
92-year history to that point. - It took four Oscars in one night: Picture, Director, Original Screenplay and International
Feature. - It won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2019 by a unanimous jury vote, the first Korean film
to do so. - The Park family’s modernist house was not a location. It was built from scratch on an
outdoor lot.
- Seven Oscars, including three acting wins for Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan and Jamie Lee
Curtis. - Michelle Yeoh became the first Asian woman to win Best Actress.
- The visual effects were handled by a team of fewer than ten people, most of them
self-taught. - Ke Huy Quan had all but left acting for two decades before this role brought him back.
- Seven Oscars, including Nolan’s first wins for directing and for Best Picture.
- Cillian Murphy and Robert Downey Jr. both took their first Academy Awards for it.
- Kodak engineered a black-and-white 65mm stock that did not previously exist so Nolan could
shoot those sequences on IMAX. - A three-hour, R-rated drama about theoretical physics that passed 950 million dollars
worldwide.
- Four Oscars, among them Best Picture and Best Director for Iñárritu.
- Emmanuel Lubezki’s win here was the middle of three consecutive cinematography Oscars,
after Gravity and before The Revenant. - Antonio Sánchez’s improvised drum score was ruled ineligible for the score category,
which caused a minor uproar. - The long-take illusion was built from a handful of extended shots joined by hidden cuts.
- Four Oscars: Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, and Supporting Actor for Javier Bardem.
- Adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 novel, with much of his dialogue carried over
intact. - Carter Burwell’s score runs about sixteen minutes and is nearly inaudible by design.
- Roger Deakins was nominated twice that year, for this and The Assassination of Jesse James,
and won for neither.
6
‘Star Wars’ (1977)
<<img src="https://static0.colliderimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/star-wars-1977.jpg?q=49&fit=crop&w=825&dpr=2" />
Image via 20th Century Studios</figure>
“May the Force be with you.” It’s almost impossible to separate Star Wars from everything that came afterward. The sequels, prequels, television series, toys, expanded universe, imitators, and enormous influence on Hollywood can obscure how impressively self-contained George Lucas‘s original movie remains. At its core, it’s simply a great adventure, borrowing shamelessly but brilliantly from old movie serials, westerns, samurai cinema, mythology, World War II films, and fantasy.
Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) is an archetypal young hero longing to escape an ordinary life, but the universe surrounding him immediately feels much larger than his individual journey. A cantina filled with aliens, references to the Clone Wars, the ruins of the Jedi, and the enormous machinery of the Empire imply histories the movie doesn’t stop to explain. The world is colorful but lived-in, brought to life through special effects that were groundbreaking for the time.
5
‘Alien’ (1979)
<<img src="https://static0.colliderimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/alien-1979-face-hugger.jpg?q=49&fit=crop&w=825&dpr=2" />
Image via 20th Century Studios</figure>
“In space no one can hear you scream.” Star Wars opened up new possibilities for cinematic sci-fi, kicking off a boom for the genre. Perhaps the greatest film to come out of that era was Alien, Ridley Scott‘s haunted-house movie in space. Where Star Wars showed up the future could look dusty and worn out, Alien took that even further, giving us a grungy, industrial spaceship crewed by blue-collar workers and, eventually, stalked by a hideous predator.
While the production design is immersive and Sigourney Weaver’s lead performance is fantastic, it’s really the monster design that elevates Alien into the pantheon of all-time great sci-fi horror. H.R. Giger‘s biomechanical Xenomorph is unlike anything else in 1970s cinema, a nightmare of acid blood and multiple mouths. The chestburster scene alone forever altered what audiences thought a mainstream sci-fi movie could show.
4Enjoying this article? Support our work with a small crypto donation.
‘Jaws’ (1975)
<<img src="https://static0.colliderimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/jaws-1975-3.jpg?q=49&fit=crop&w=825&dpr=2" />
Image via Universal Pictures</figure>
“You’re gonna need a bigger boat.” With this one, Spielberg helped create the modern blockbuster as we know it (and made an entire generation wary of the ocean). The core of the plot is about a town menaced by a shark, but Jaws is a masterpiece because the monster isn’t the only attraction. For example, Roy Scheider‘s Martin Brody, Richard Dreyfuss’ Matt Hooper, and Robert Shaw‘s Quint are such distinctive personalities that the final stretch becomes as much about three incompatible men trapped aboard a small boat as it is about killing a giant predator.
Likewise, elements like Quint’s Indianapolis monologue briefly transform an adventure movie into something closer to a ghost story, and John Williams‘ famously simple score turns two alternating notes into an announcement of approaching death. Finally, the visual storytelling is extraordinarily economical: Spielberg wrings enormous suspense out of things like a yellow barrel or a point-of-view shot moving through the water.
3
‘Apocalypse Now’ (1979)
<<img src="https://static0.colliderimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/apocalypse-now-1979-4.jpg?q=49&fit=crop&w=825&dpr=2" />
Image via United Artists</figure>
“I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” Here, Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) is sent into Cambodia to assassinate Colonel Walter Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a decorated American officer who has apparently gone rogue and established himself as something resembling a demigod. However, War already looks insane in Apocalypse Now before Willard gets particularly far upriver. It’s a cavalcade of surfing soldiers and Wagner blasting from loudspeakers while helicopters lay waste to the ground below.
Along the way, Francis Ford Coppola takes Joseph Conrad‘s Heart of Darkness, relocates it to Vietnam, and twists it into an increasingly surreal descent through violence, colonialism, madness, and darker demons of human nature. This was a staggeringly ambitious project, and one that almost destroyed both cast and crew, and yet the finished product is a genuine landmark, the zenith of gonzo 1970s auteur filmmaking.
2
‘Chinatown’ (1974)
<<img src="https://static0.colliderimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/chinatown-1974.jpg?q=49&fit=crop&w=825&dpr=2" />
Image via Paramount Pictures</figure>
“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.” Chinatown initially gives J.J. “Jake” Gittes (Nicholson) exactly the sort of case a private detective expects: follow a married man and determine whether he’s having an affair. Then Jake discovers that the woman who hired him wasn’t actually the man’s wife, the supposed adulterer turns up dead, and a relatively petty scandal begins expanding into something a lot more sinister, involving the water supply and land speculation.
Indeed, Robert Towne‘s exceptional screenplay takes classic noir structures and takes them to new heights and arranges them in new shapes, as well as a modern sheen, making for one of the era’s punchiest, most cynical statements. The final scene is devastating because the detective actually does solve the mystery, but it does him virtually no good. In this nihilistic world, understanding isn’t enough to thwart the shadowy forces pulling the strings.
1
‘The Godfather Part II’ (1974)
<<img src="https://static0.colliderimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/the-godfather-part-ii-1974-7.jpg?q=49&fit=crop&w=825&dpr=2" />
Image via Paramount Pictures</figure>
“I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart.” Coppola strikes again (his run of movies during this decade ranks among the greatest ever). The Godfather Part II expands and complicates the original, serving up an ambitious parallel narrative about two generations of the Corleone family. One storyline follows Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) consolidating his power in the late 1950s, while another traces his father Vito’s (Robert De Niro) rise decades earlier.
The juxtaposition is devastating. Vito builds power through relationships and favors. Michael, by contrast, possesses vastly greater wealth and influence, yet every attempt to protect his family leaves him more isolated from it. His marriage disintegrates, and suspicion consumes him. Worse still, the movie shows us that the downfall of the son was sown by the father’s success. A Shakespearean tragedy in a ’70s crime package.
Discover more from NAIRAVOICE.COM.NG
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
