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: 3.5★
Few films in the history of British cinema arrived with quite as much expectation and logistical weight as Doctor Zhivago. Based on Boris Pasternak's Nobel Prize-winning novel, published in the West in 1957 after the Soviet authorities suppressed it at home, the source material already carried enormous
Rating: 3.5★
Charles M. Schulz's Peanuts strip had been running in American newspapers since 1950, and by the late 1960s it had already made a successful leap to television via the beloved specials produced by Lee Mendelson and Bill Melendez, most notably A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965) and It'
Rating: 3.0★
Released in June 1963, just five months before the assassination that would freeze John F. Kennedy in the public imagination forever, PT 109 arrived at a peculiar moment in American cultural life. Kennedy was a sitting president, still very much alive and active in office, yet Warner Bros. had secured
Rating: 1.0★
Stan Brakhage made Mothlight in 1963 without touching a camera. Working at a time when American avant-garde cinema was pushing hard against the conventions of narrative film, Brakhage collected dead moths, dried leaves, flower petals and fragments of insect wing, pressed them between two strips of clear splicing tape,
Rating: 3.5★
There are films that travel, and there are films that get lost. I Am Cuba (or Soy Cuba, as it was titled on release) belongs to a peculiar third category: films that simply vanished, only to be rediscovered decades later and treated as if they had been divine transmissions all
Rating: 3.5★
Egypt in 1881 sat at a peculiar crossroads: the Ottoman-backed Khedivate was losing its grip, European financial interests were tightening around the country like a slow vice, and the great pharaonic sites of the Nile Valley were being systematically stripped, catalogued, and shipped westward. It was into this charged
Rating: 3.5★
The summer of 1967 was, by any reasonable measure, a peculiar and fascinating moment in American cultural life. The counterculture that had been quietly gathering momentum through coffeehouses and college campuses suddenly felt as though it had tipped into something bigger, louder, and altogether more colourful. The Monterey International Pop
Rating: 4.0★
By the mid-1960s, Formula One had grown from a specialist motorsport into a genuinely global spectacle, its calendar sweeping through Monaco, Spa, Monza, and beyond, drawing enormous crowds and an air of glamorous, sometimes fatal, theatre. The 1966 season in particular marked a major technical turning point for the
Rating: 3.5★
There are political thrillers, and then there are films that arrive so charged with real-world fury that the fiction barely disguises the rage beneath. Costa-Gavras's Z (1969) is very much the latter. Based on Vassilis Vassilikos's 1966 novel of the same name, the film
Rating: 2.5★
Ingmar Bergman made Winter Light in 1963 as the second film in what critics and scholars have come to call his "silence of God" trilogy, sandwiched between Through a Glass Darkly (1961) and The Silence (1963). The trilogy emerged from a period of intense personal and artistic reckoning
Rating: 3.5★
The figure of Yuki-onna, the snow woman of Japanese folklore, has haunted the country's storytelling tradition for centuries. She appears in woodblock prints, Noh theatre, and countless regional variants of the same essential myth: a female spirit of the winter mountains, beautiful, lethal, and possessed of a
1960s
Viy (1967) is a strange and almost solitary object in Soviet cinema: a horror film, an actual horror film with monsters and demons and supernatural set-pieces, in a national cinema that mostly didn’t make horror at all. Officially endorsed by Mosfilm and based on a Nikolai Gogol folktale,
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