Best Movies of the 1960s

Lawrence of Arabia to 2001 to The Wild Bunch. The decade the studio system finally fractured, and the films that did the fracturing.

The 1960s is the decade the American studio system finally stopped working. The Production Code's collapse, the rise of television as a competing medium, the cultural shifts of the late 1960s (civil rights, Vietnam, the counterculture) — all converged to leave the major studios producing increasingly out-of-touch material while a new generation of European-influenced American directors began to emerge.

Internationally, the 1960s is one of the highest peaks in cinema history. The French New Wave was at its commercial peak; Italian directors (Fellini, Antonioni, Visconti, Bertolucci) were producing what would become the canonical Italian cinema; Akira Kurosawa was making Yojimbo, High and Low, and Red Beard; Bergman was producing Persona and Hour of the Wolf. Our picks lean international and toward the late-1960s end of American cinema, when the system was already cracking.

The ten

  • 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) — Kubrick. The single most-influential film of the decade and arguably of the second half of the 20th century.
  • Psycho (1960) — Hitchcock. The shower scene was a thirty-year shift in what mainstream cinema could show.
  • Lawrence of Arabia (1962) — David Lean. The last great old-Hollywood epic.
  • Dr. Strangelove (1964) — Kubrick again. Nuclear annihilation as farce.
  • 8½ (1963) — Federico Fellini. The film about not being able to make a film.
  • The Graduate (1967) — Mike Nichols. The film that announced New Hollywood.
  • Bonnie and Clyde (1967) — Arthur Penn. The film that ended the Production Code era.
  • Yojimbo (1961) — Kurosawa. The model for A Fistful of Dollars (1964).
  • Persona (1966) — Bergman. The identity-collapse film.
  • The Wild Bunch (1969) — Sam Peckinpah. The Western's classical mode ended here.

Why the decade matters

The 1960s is the decade that produced the directors of the 1970s. Almost every figure who would define New Hollywood — Coppola, Scorsese, Spielberg, Lucas, De Palma, Friedkin, Bogdanovich — came up in the late 1960s. The films they made in the early 1970s are unimaginable without the 1960s' specific cultural pressures.

Internationally, the decade's influence on every subsequent national cinema has been enormous. The Italian arthouse tradition, the French New Wave, the Brazilian Cinema Novo, the Czechoslovak New Wave (cut short by 1968) — all came of age in the 1960s and shaped the global cinema landscape for the next fifty years.