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Best Movies of 1979

The highest-rated films released in 1979, ranked by TMDB user score among titles with at least 500 votes.

📊 A century of movies in numbers 32 titlesavg ★ 7.07 avg 113 min Drama Comedy Science-fiction Action

Most watched in 1979

Alien1979 · ★ 8.2 · 1h 57m

Apocalypse Now1979 · ★ 8.3 · 2h 27m

Mad Max1979 · ★ 6.7 · 1h 31m

Life of Brian1979 · ★ 7.8 · 1h 34m

Rocky II1979 · ★ 7.3 · 1h 59m

Escape from Alcatraz1979 · ★ 7.5 · 1h 53m

← 1978 All years 1980 →

#1 Apocalypse Now (1979) · ★ 8.3 · 9,419 votes · 2h 27m · drama, war
At the height of the Vietnam war, Captain Benjamin Willard is sent on a dangerous mission that, officially, "does not exist, nor will it ever exist." His goal is to locate - and el…
#2 Alien (1979) · ★ 8.2 · 16,863 votes · 1h 57m · horror, science-fiction
During its return to the earth, commercial spaceship Nostromo intercepts a distress signal from a distant planet. When a three-member team of the crew discovers a chamber containin…
#3 Stalker (1979) · ★ 8.1 · 2,626 votes · 2h 42m · drama, science-fiction
Near a gray and unnamed city is the Zone, a place guarded by barbed wire and soldiers, and where the normal laws of physics are victim to frequent anomalies. A stalker guides two m…
#4 Life of Brian (1979) · ★ 7.8 · 5,108 votes · 1h 34m · comedy
Brian Cohen is an average young Jewish man, but through a series of ridiculous events, he gains a reputation as the Messiah. When he's not dodging his followers or being scolded by…
#5 Manhattan (1979) · ★ 7.7 · 2,680 votes · 1h 36m · comedy, romance, drama
Manhattan explores how the life of a middle-aged television writer dating a teenage girl is further complicated when he falls in love with his best friend's mistress.…
#6 The Warriors (1979) · ★ 7.7 · 2,488 votes · 1h 34m · action, thriller
Prominent gang leader Cyrus calls a meeting of New York's gangs to set aside their turf wars and take over the city. At the meeting, a rival leader kills Cyrus, but a Coney Island…
#7 Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) · ★ 7.6 · 2,478 votes · 1h 45m · drama
Ted Kramer is a career man for whom his work comes before his family. His wife Joanna cannot take this anymore, so she decides to leave him. Ted is now faced with the tasks of hous…
#8 Being There (1979) · ★ 7.6 · 1,166 votes · 2h 10m · comedy, drama
A simple-minded gardener named Chance has spent all his life in the Washington D.C. house of an old man. When the man dies, Chance is put out on the street with no knowledge of the…
#9 Escape from Alcatraz (1979) · ★ 7.5 · 3,288 votes · 1h 53m · thriller, drama
San Francisco Bay, January 18, 1960. Frank Lee Morris is transferred to Alcatraz, a maximum security prison located on a rocky island. Although no one has ever managed to escape fr…
#10 The Castle of Cagliostro (1979) · ★ 7.5 · 1,163 votes · 1h 42m · comedy, adventure, animation
After a successful robbery leaves famed thief Lupin the Third and his partner Jigen with nothing but a large amount of expertly crafted counterfeit bills, he decides to track down…
#11 All That Jazz (1979) · ★ 7.5 · 632 votes · 2h 3m · drama
Joe Gideon is at the top of the heap, one of the most successful directors and choreographers in musical theater. But he can feel his world slowly collapsing around him - his obses…
#12 Rocky II (1979) · ★ 7.3 · 4,977 votes · 1h 59m · action, drama
After Rocky goes the distance with champ Apollo Creed, both try to put the fight behind them and move on. Rocky settles down with Adrian but can't put his life together outside the…
#13 French Fried Vacation 2 (1979) · ★ 7.3 · 1,284 votes · 1h 27m · comedy
In this sequel to Les Bronzes (1978) summer has passed, but that doesn't mean the fun has to end for Bernard, Nathalie, Gigi, Jerome, Popeye, Jean-Claude, and Christiane.…
#14 Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) · ★ 7.3 · 1,130 votes · 1h 47m · drama, horror
A real estate agent leaves behind his beautiful wife to go to Transylvania to visit the mysterious Count Dracula and formalize the purchase of a property in Wismar.…
#15 Hair (1979) · ★ 7.3 · 777 votes · 2h 1m · comedy, drama, music
Upon receiving his draft notice and leaving his family ranch in Oklahoma, Claude heads to New York and befriends a tribe of long-haired hippies on his way to boot camp.…
#16 The Muppet Movie (1979) · ★ 7.2 · 725 votes · 1h 37m · comedy, adventure, family
The Muppets gather to watch their newly-finished big-budget rich-and-famous feature film: a talent agent persuades Kermit the Frog to leave the swamp to pursue a career in Hollywoo…
#17 ...And Justice for All (1979) · ★ 7.1 · 618 votes · 1h 59m · drama
An ethical Baltimore defense lawyer disgusted with rampant legal corruption is forced to defend a judge he despises in a rape trial under the threat of being disbarred.…
#18 The China Syndrome (1979) · ★ 7.1 · 539 votes · 2h 2m · thriller, drama
While doing a series of reports on alternative energy sources, opportunistic reporter Kimberly Wells witnesses an accident at a nuclear power plant. Wells is determined to publiciz…
#19 The Tin Drum (1979) · ★ 7.0 · 562 votes · 2h 42m · drama, history, war
In 1924, Oskar Matzerath is born in the Free City of Danzig. At age three, he falls down a flight of stairs and stops growing. In 1939, World War II breaks out.…
#20 The Jerk (1979) · ★ 6.9 · 934 votes · 1h 34m · comedy
After discovering he's not really black like the rest of his family, likable dimwit Navin Johnson sets off on a hilarious misadventure that takes him from rags to riches and back a…
#21 I'm for the Hippopotamus (1979) · ★ 6.8 · 538 votes · 1h 35m · action, comedy, adventure
In 1950, in Africa. Tom organizes safaris for tourists, secretly equipping them with guns loaded with blanks. When Slim, Tom’s cousin—a sly slacker and staunch environmentalist—arr…
#22 Mad Max (1979) · ★ 6.7 · 5,133 votes · 1h 31m · action, adventure, thriller
In the ravaged near-future, a savage motorcycle gang rules the road. Terrorizing innocent civilians while tearing up the streets, the ruthless gang laughs in the face of a police f…
#23 The Brood (1979) · ★ 6.7 · 846 votes · 1h 32m · horror, science-fiction
A man tries to uncover an unconventional psychologist's therapy techniques on his institutionalised wife, amidst a series of brutal murders.…
#24 Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979) · ★ 6.7 · 697 votes · 1h 31m · horror
After an abandoned boat sails into New York harbor with a zombie aboard, a reporter teams up with the daughter of the boat's missing captain to investigate the island where he was…
#25 Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) · ★ 6.5 · 2,015 votes · 2h 11m · adventure, science-fiction, mystery
When an unidentified alien destroys three powerful Klingon cruisers, Captain James T. Kirk returns to the newly transformed U.S.S. Enterprise to take command.…
#26 Phantasm (1979) · ★ 6.5 · 814 votes · 1h 29m · horror, science-fiction
A teenage boy and his friends face off against a mysterious grave robber, known only as the Tall Man, who employs a lethal arsenal of unearthly weapons.…
#27 The Amityville Horror (1979) · ★ 6.3 · 1,073 votes · 1h 58m · horror
George Lutz, his wife Kathy, and their three children have just moved into a beautiful, and improbably cheap, Victorian mansion nestled in the sleepy coastal town of Amityville, Lo…
#28 Moonraker (1979) · ★ 6.2 · 2,297 votes · 2h 6m · action, adventure, thriller
After Drax Industries' Moonraker space shuttle is hijacked, secret agent James Bond is assigned to investigate, traveling to California to meet the company's owner, the mysterious…
#29 The Gendarme and the Creatures from Outer Space (1979) · ★ 6.1 · 672 votes · 1h 36m · comedy, science-fiction
The bungling inspector Cruchot finds himself trying to save the residents of St. Tropez from some oil-drinking humanoid aliens. The only way to tell the aliens from the real people…
#30 Caligula (1979) · ★ 6.0 · 994 votes · 2h 36m · drama, history
After the death of the paranoid emperor Tiberius, Caligula, his heir, seizes power and plunges the empire into a bloody spiral of madness and depravity.…
#31 1941 (1979) · ★ 5.8 · 733 votes · 1h 58m · action, comedy, war
In the days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, panic grips California, where a military officer leads a mob chasing a Japanese sub.…
#32 The Black Hole (1979) · ★ 5.8 · 573 votes · 1h 38m · action, adventure, science-fiction
The explorer craft USS Palomino is returning to Earth after a fruitless 18-month search for extra-terrestrial life when the crew comes upon a supposedly lost ship, the USS Cygnus,…