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★
There's a moment in Monterey Pop where you stop thinking about the camera, stop thinking about the era, stop thinking about anything really, and you just feel it. D. A. Pennebaker had a gift for that. He didn't announce himself, didn't impose a grand
Rating: 4.0★
There's a moment watching Grand Prix where you stop thinking about cinema entirely and just grip the armrest. John Frankenheimer mounted cameras directly onto the cars, put you inside the cockpit, and suddenly you're not sitting in a darkened room anymore. You're hurtling around
Rating: 3.5★
Roger Ebert called Z his favourite film of 1969. It made history as the first film ever nominated for both Best Picture and Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards. It sits near the top of Letterboxd's all-time charts and is routinely name-checked whenever anyone
Rating: 2.5★
There's a moment early in Winter Light when Bergman simply lets his camera sit in a Swedish church and watch a Sunday service play out, nearly in full, in real time. No cuts to spare you, no intercutting to build tension, just the sermon, the sparse congregation, the
Rating: 3.5★
There's a moment early in The Snow Woman where the frame holds on a vast white landscape, the silence so complete you can almost feel the cold through the screen, and you know immediately that this film is going to do things its own way. Tokuzo Tanaka isn&
1960s
The last fifteen minutes of Viy are something else. A church fills with demons, spectral hands reach through stone walls, a levitating corpse traces slow circles through the dark, and then the creature itself is revealed: an ancient, monstrous thing with eyelids that have to be lifted by its servants
Genre Drama
★★★ — Persona (1966)
Genre Horror
★★★½ — Carnival of Souls (1962)
Genre Comedy
★★½ — Daisies (1966)
Genre Documentary
★★½ — Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1968)
Genre Comedy
★★½ — David Holzman's Diary (1967)
Genre Action
★★½ — Come Drink with Me (1966)
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