This is a list of the 120 highest-ranked films on Letterboxd in the decade of the 1970s, within certain qualifications, as of 17 February 2025.

To make a list like this meaningful, you need to set a threshold for numbers of ratings before including a film, mitigating the effect of spurious high ratings and helping ensure the rankings really do represent a significant consensus of viewers. The current threshold for the overall Letterboxd Top 250 is 15,000 ratings, but on average fewer people rate older films and with such a high bar the list would be heavily slanted towards well-known Hollywood productions with a good few interesting films excluded. So I've set a threshold of 2,000 to allow a sufficiently varied list, revised up from 1,000 in February 2025 in line with an overall increase in the number of ratings.

Another difference from the Letterboxd 250 is that I've included TV movies and mini-series, shorts, documentaries and non-narrative films besides narrative features, including a few concert films that were released theatrically and acclaimed in their own right. I have however excluded seasons and segments of ongoing TV series that for various reasons have individual entries on Letterboxd as I don't think these make much sense out of context. I've also excluded series with more than 26 episodes even if one-offs, already a generous definition of a mini-series.

There are 120 titles because I figure that the world's film industry should be able to manage at least one really great film per month on average.

This is one of a series of work-in-progress decade by decade lists along similar lines. See letterboxd.com/desdemoor/tag/highest-rated-by-decade/lists/

<- Back to 1960-1969.
-> Forward to 1980-1989.

Pedant's corner: I personally believe the 1970s began on 1 January 1971, but sadly most of the rest of the world seems to disagree with me, including Letterboxd. So to make life easier, all the films listed were released between 1970 and 1979 inclusive.

List first posted 31 March 2021