How to Process a File Line-By-Line in Linux

Being a Linux noob, I had to look around for how to process a text file line by line in a shell script. I have no idea if this is the best way, but here's what I figured out:

cat movies | awk 'system("echo " $1)'

where "foo" is the file. That sends the file to awk, and the stuff in the single quotes tells it to invoke the system command "echo" for each line of the file, passing the line to it.  You can obviously  substitute other commands for "echo", like "wget" to download a bunch of stuff if the file is a list of URLs.