The 1960s cracked cinema wide open: New Wave movements across France, Japan and Italy rewrote the rules of storytelling, while Hollywood's old studio system quietly collapsed under the pressure. From Kurosawa's tightly wound moral dramas like High and Low to the sun-baked mythology of Once Upon a Time in the West, the decade produced films still studied as benchmarks. See what Macca made of them below.
Rating: 3.0★
By 1967, Hollywood was in the middle of an identity crisis it could not quite name. The old studio system was crumbling, European art cinema was bleeding across the Atlantic, and a generation of filmmakers was working out what American genre pictures could look like if you dismantled them from
Rating: 3.5★
By 1964, Italian genre cinema was operating in a world of its own, producing work that bore little resemblance to what Hollywood or the British studios were turning out. Blood and Black Lace sits at the centre of that moment, a film that helped crystallise the giallo as a recognisable
Rating: 0.5★
Dog Star Man is one of the most discussed works in the history of American experimental cinema, a film that arrived in pieces between 1961 and 1964 before being assembled into its complete 78-minute form in 1965. Stan Brakhage released it through Film-Makers' Cooperative, the distribution organisation
Rating: 3.0★
Some films you admire more than you enjoy, and some films you respect more than you admire. Titicut Follies sits somewhere in that uncomfortable second category, and I've been turning it over in my head ever since the credits rolled, not because it moved me in any clean
Rating: 2.5★
There is a particular horror in hearing mass death described as a job well done. Operation Dominic is essentially an hour of exactly that, and the discomfort never really lets up, even when you know going in what you are dealing with. This is not a documentary in any ordinary
Country United States Of America
There are films you watch and films you remember, and The Jungle Book is firmly in the second camp. I couldn't tell you the first time I saw it, because it feels like it was always just there, woven into the furniture of early memory alongside the smell
Rating: 3.5★
Let's talk about the sheer, unadulterated audacity of what David Lean pulled off with this one. You look at those sweeping, snow-drenched landscapes and assume some magical winter wonderland was captured on celluloid, that the production company packed up and headed somewhere gloriously frozen for months on
Rating: 3.5★
There's something almost rebellious about how unashamed A Boy Named Charlie Brown is of its own age. Press play and within seconds you're confronted with scratchy lines, flat colours, and character movements that creak along with a kind of charming stiffness. This is nearly sixty years
Rating: 3.0★
You know the feeling. It's a lazy Sunday afternoon, you're half-awake on the sofa, and you flick through the channels until you land on something that demands absolutely nothing from you: a perfectly harmless, aggressively middle-of-the-road war picture playing out in faded
Rating: 1.0★
Let me be upfront: I subjected myself to Mothlight as part of my ongoing challenge to complete every list on Letterboxd's stats page. Not exactly the most romantic way to encounter a piece of avant-garde history, but there you go. And having now sat through Stan Brakhage&
Rating: 3.5★
Twenty-ninth highest-rated film of all time on Letterboxd. Let that sink in for a moment. That is the weight I Am Cuba carries before you have even pressed play, and it is, frankly, an impossible burden for any film to shoulder. I went in expecting something close to
Rating: 3.5★
Forget Indiana Jones. Forget every Hollywood adventure where an ancient Egyptian tomb exists purely as a puzzle box for some square-jawed foreigner to crack open. If you want to understand the real human story behind those extraordinary discoveries, the guilt, the compromise, the impossible weight of deciding who a
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