10 Essential Movies of 1979, Ranked

1979 wasn't just the end of a decade—it was a cinematic mic drop. The final year of the '70s saw American auteurs at the height of their creative power, international filmmakers rewriting the language of cinema, and Hollywood discovering just how potent a genre film could be when mixed with ambition. This was a time when movies weren’t afraid to get weird, bleak, or philosophically dense—yet somehow, they still pulled in audiences.