This page contains links to all the films I have reviewed in the 60s. Hollywood started a journey from the breezy musicals to more the edgy material that would mark the 70s. Cynicism and counter-culture dribbled into films with Cold War conspiracy thrillers and bitter satires. In Britain Kitchen Sink Dramas pushed class to the forefront, while other films critiqued the Swinging Sixties. In Europe, gifted directors pushed the boundaries of cinema stylistically and emotionally. A generation of directors came to the fore who grew up on movies and homaged old films in their new work.
1960
 | A Bout de Souffle – a Bogart-obsessed young man commits crimes and falls in love in Godard’s French New Wave classic | Director: Jean-Luc Godard Cast: Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean Seberg, Daniel Boulanger |
 | The Apartment – Best Picture winner about an ambitious worker who lends his apartment out for his bosses affairs | Director: Billy Wilder Cast: Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray |
 | La Dolce Vita – a hedonistic would-be-novelist flits from party to party in Rome and never writes a word | Director: Federico Fellini Cast: Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg, Anouk Aimee |
 | The Entertainer – a selfish, seedy end-of-the-pier performer staggers from personal disaster to personal disaster | Director: Tony Richardson Cast: Laurence Olivier, Brenda de Banzie, Roger Livesey |
 | Inherit the Wind – faith vs science in this reimagining of the Scopes Monkey Trial | Director: Stanley Kramer Cast: Spencer Tracy, Fredric March, Gene Kelly |
 | The League of Gentlemen – ex-servicemen denied their pay-offs, plot a heist in this great, overlooked, crime caper | Director: Basil Dearden Cast: Jack Hawkins, Nigel Patrick, Richard Attenborough |
 | The Magnificent Seven – gunfighters are hired by farmers to take down bandits. Gloriously fun remake | Director: John Sturges Cast: Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Eli Wallach |
 | Psycho – iconic murder mystery/horror film with the scariest shower scene ever | Director: Alfred Hitchcock Cast: Janet Leigh, Anthony Perkins, Vera Miles |
 | Saturday Night and Sunday Morning – a rebellious, chippy highly-skilled working class man refuses to be told what to do | Director: Karel Reisz Cast: Albert Finney, Rachel Roberts, Shirley Anne Field |
 | Spartacus – iconic Ancient Rome action epic, as slaves fight for freedom. “I’m Spartacus!” | Director: Stanley Kubrick Cast: Kirk Douglas, Laurence Olivier, Peter Ustinov |
 | The Virgin Spring – a senseless killing leads to loss of faith in Bergman’s challenging but essential ‘other’ Medieval film | Director: Ingmar Bergman Cast: Max von Sydow, Birgitta Valberg, Birgitta Pettersson |
1961
 | The Children’s Hour – two teachers are accused of being lesbians leading to local scandal in this play adaptation | Director: William Wyler Cast: Audrey Hepburn, Shirley MacLaine, James Garner |
 | El Cid – a Spanish lord makes allies with the Muslims, to the fury of his King in this sweeping epic | Director: Anthony Mann Cast: Charlton Heston, Sophia Loren, Herbert Lom |
 | The Guns of Navarone – classic men-on-a-mission film as a WW2 team goes to blow up the eponymous guns | Director: J Lee Thompson Cast: Gregory Peck, David Niven, Anthony Quinn |
 | Judgment at Nuremberg – Nazi officials are placed on trial, but will politics get in the way in this cracking drama | Director: Stanley Kramer Cast: Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Maximilian Schell |
 | Through a Glass Darkly – a woman suffering schizophrenia doubts God’s existence in this Bergman Oscar-winner | Director: Ingmar Bergman Cast: Harriet Andersson, Gunnar Björnstrand, Max von Sydow |
 | Victim – a closeted lawyer is blackmailed in this pioneering drama on gay rights | Director: Basil Dearden Cast: Dirk Bogarde, Sylvia Sims, Derek Price |
 | West Side Story – Best Picture winning classic musical about dancing street gangs with some of the best dancing you’ll ever see | Director: Robert Wise, Jerome Robbins Cast: Natalie Wood, Richard Beymer, Rita Moreno |
1962
 | Birdman of Alcatraz – a lifer in prison dedicates his time to becoming a leading expert on ornithology | Director: John Frankenheimer Cast: Burt Lancaster, Karl Malden, Thelma Ritter |
 | Dr No – the first ever James Bond film, gets a lot of the formula in place from day one | Director: Terence Young Cast: Sean Connery, Ursual Andress, Joseph Wiseman |
 | Jules et Jim – Truffaut’s classic menage as a Frenchman and a German share a mutual love for a French woman | Director: François Truffaut Cast: Jeanne Moreau, Oskar Werner, Henri Serre |
 | The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner – a borstal boy has only one skill – running – which is exploited by the Governor | Director: Tony Richardson Cast: Tom Courtenay, Michael Redgrave, Avis Bunnage |
 | The Longest Day – huge scale D-Day drama with an all-star cast | Director: Ken Annakin, Andrew Martan, Bernhard Wicki Cast: John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Henry Fonda |
 | The Manchurian Candidate – brilliant, chilling brainwash conspiracy thriller as Korean war vets are programmed to kill | Director: John Frankenheimer Cast: Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, Angela Lansbury |
 | Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? – two sisters feud over the past in the first ever “hag horror” | Director: Robert Aldrich Cast: Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Victor Buono |
1963
 | The Birds – our feathered friends go crazy in this apocalyptic Hitchcock horror film based on a du Maurier short story | Director: Alfred Hitchcock Cast: Tippi Hedron, Rod Taylor, Jessica Tandy |
 | Cleopatra – the epic that nearly sunk a studio, fascinating and a mess at the same time. | Director: Joseph L. Mankiewicz Cast: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Rex Harrison |
 | Eight and a Half – Fellini’s brilliant fantasy about his own life, love, careers and past packed with many brilliant moments | Director: Federico Fellini Cast: Marcello Mastroianni, Anouk Aimée, Rossella Falk |
 | The Great Escape – classic prison break from a POW camp, a staple of Bank Holiday Mondays | Director: John Sturges Cast: Steve McQueen, James Garner, Richard Attenborough |
 | How the West Was Won – packed with stars and filmed in super-duper widescreen, basically a short story anthology | Director: Henry Hathaway, John Ford, George Marshall Cast: Gregory Peck, Carroll Baker, James Stewart |
 | Jason and the Argonauts – absolutely superb Harryhausen Greek myths film, which I’ve loved since being a kid | Director: Don Chaffey Cast: Todd Armstrong, Nancy Kovack, Gary Raymond |
 | The Leopard – an ageing Prince is out-of-step with the new Italy in Visconti’s lavish and superb costume drama | Director: Luchino Visconti Cast: Burt Lancaster, Alain Delon, Claudia Cardinale |
 | Lilies of the Field – a travelling handyman builds a church for a group of German nuns | Director: Ralph Nelson Cast: Sidney Poitier, Lilia Skala, Lisa Mann |
 | The Servant – a creepy butler manipulates his weak-willed master in this breath-taking British classic | Director: Joseph Losey Cast: Dirk Bogarde, James Fox, Sarah Miles |
 | This Sporting Life – a self-loathing rugby player struggles to express his feelings in this hard-hitting kitchen sink drama | Director: Lindsay Anderson Cast: Richard Harris, Rachel Roberts, Alan Badel |
 | Tom Jones – Best Picture winning sex-farce about a rogueish adopted son of a country squire, which tries way to hard | Director: Tony Richardson Cast: Albert Finney, Susannah York, Hugh Griffith |
1964
 | Becket – Henry II and Thomas Becket fall out and feud in this grand, literary historical epic | Director: Peter Glenville Cast: Richard Burton, Peter O’Toole, John Gielgud |
 | Dr Strangelove; or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb – nuclear war farce, blackly hilarious end-of-the-world | Director: Stanley Kubrick Cast: Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden |
 | Fail Safe – Dr Strangelove played absolutely straight, but full of brilliant scenes and performances | Director: Sidney Lumet Cast: Henry Fonda, Dan O’Herlihy, Walter Matthau |
 | Goldfinger – possibly the greatest Bond film, as a mad man launches a plot against Fort Know to increase the value of his gold | Director: Guy Hamilton Cast: Sean Connery, Honor Blackman, Gert Fröbe |
 | Lilith – a troubled counsellor starts to fall in love with his disturbed patient and finds his own grip on reality slipping | Director: Robert Rossen Cast: Warren Beatty, Jean Seberg, Peter Fonda |
 | My Fair Lady – Best Picture winning musical version of Pygmalion, very stagy and unoriginal, rather flatly made | Director: George Cukor Cast: Rex Harrison, Audrey Hepburn, Sterling Holloway |
 | The Pumpkin Eater – an unhappy novelist struggles to deal with her husband’s infidelity and hold her family together | Director: Jack Clayton Cast: Anne Bancroft, Peter Finch, James Mason |
 | Seance on a Wet Afternoon – a mystic and her husband kidnap a child so that she can ‘discover’ him and prove her gift | Director: Bryan Forbes Cast: Kim Stanley, Richard Attenborough, Nanette Newman |
 | Seven Days in May – an American general plots a coup in this conspiracy thriller | Director: John Frankenheimer Cast: Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Fredric March |
 | The Train – a French resistance fighter frustrates a German general, stealing France’s art legacy by train | Director: John Frankenheimer Cast: Burt Lancaster, Paul Scofield, Jeanne Moreau |
 | Zorba the Greek – a Brit learns to become Greek from a larger-than-life peasant in a tonally confused film | Director: Michael Cacoyannis Cast: Anthony Quinn, Alan Bates, Irene Papas, Lila Kedrova |
 | Zulu – a small group of British soldiers stand firm against overwhelming orders in this non-triumphalist Zulu war film | Director: Cy Endfield Cast: Stanley Baker, Michael Caine, Jack Hawkins |
1965
 | The Agony and the Ecstasy – Michaelangelo takes a very, very, long time to paint the Sistine Chapel in this flawed but enjoyable epic | Director: Carol Reed Cast: Charlton Heston, Rex Harrison, Harry Andrews |
 | Bunny Lake is Missing – a woman insists her daughter has gone missing – but there seems to be no record that her daughter even exists | Director: Otto Preminger Cast: Laurence Olivier, Carl Lynley, Kier Dullea |
 | The Collector – a disturbed young man kidnaps a woman, hoping she will fall in love with him | Director: William Wyler Cast: Terence Stamp, Samantha Egger |
 | Doctor Zhivago – Lean mega-epic about revolutionary Russia, looks pretty but miscast and more than a little empty | Director: David Lean Cast: Omar Sharif, Julie Christie, Rod Steiger |
 | The Flight of the Phoenix – an aircraft crashes in the desert and the survivors must rebuild it to have any chance of surviving | Director: Robert Aldrich Cast: James Stewart, Richard Attenborough, Peter Finch |
 | The Greatest Story Ever Told – epic, tedious story of the life of Christ, that turns the most interesting life ever into a drag | Director: George Stevens Cast: Max von Sydow, Dorothy McGuire, Charlton Heston |
 | The Heroes of Telemark – SOE plans to blow up a Norwegian factory during WWII – not as good as other similar films | Director: Anthony Mann Cast: Kirk Douglas, Richard Harris, Ulla Jacobsson |
 | The Ipcress File – a working class spy uncovers a conspiracy but struggles to get his posh bosses to listen | Director: Sidney J Furie Cast: Michael Caine, Guy Doleman, Nigel Green |
 | Khartoum – General Gordon makes his final stand in this biographical epic | Director: Basil Dearden Cast: Charlton Heston, Laurence Olivier, Richard Johnson |
 | The Pawnbroker – hugely depressing drama about a Holocaust survivor, now living in New York, still crushed with guilt | Director: Sidney Lumet Cast: Rod Steiger, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Brock Peters |
 | Ship of Fools – an eclectic group of passengers lives intersect on a long voyage from US to Nazi Germany in the 1930s | Director: Stanley Kramer Cast: Vivien Leigh, Oskar Werner, Simone Signoret |
 | The Sound of Music – Best Picture winning musical about singing nuns and loving families. The most popular movie ever? | Director: Robert Wise Cast: Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer, Eleanor Parker |
 | The Spy Who Came In From the Cold – a ground-down spy gets involved in a masterplot to discredit an East German spy catcher | Director: Martin Ritt Cast: Richard Burton, Claire Bloom, Oskar Werner |
 | Thunderball – Bond searches for lost nuclear weapons and spends a lot of time underwater in a film I’ve often found boring | Director: Terence Young Cast: Sean Connery, Alfredo Celi, Claudine Auger |
1966
 | Alfie – a heartless cockney wide-boy gets himself into all sorts of entanglements in this expose of swinging sixties London | Director: Lewis Gilbert Cast: Michael Caine, Shelley Winters, Millicent Martin |
 | Au hasard, Balthasar – Bresson makes a striking Christ-like parable in this simple but moving film | Director: Robert Bresson Cast: Anne Wiazemsky, Walter Green, François Lafarge |
 | The Battle of Algiers – hugely influential documentary style dramatisation of the uprising against the French in Algiers | Director: Gilles Pontecorvo Cast: Jean Martin, Yacef Saadi, Brahim Hadjadi |
 | The Deadly Affair – marvellous Le Carré adaptation as a British spy with an unfaithful wife tracks a killer in London | Director: Sidney Lumet Cast: James Mason, Simeone Signoret, Maximilian Schell |
 | Georgy Girl – a plain-looking young woman searches for happiness in another 1966 expose of the Swinging Sixties | Director: Silvio Narizzano Cast: Lynn Redgrave, Alan Bates, James Mason |
 | The Good, the Bad and the Ugly – the most iconic Spaghetti Western of them all, a trio of men search for Gold in the West | Directer: Sergio Leone Cast: Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach, Lee Van Cleef |
 | A Man For All Seasons – Thomas More won’t compromise on Henry VIII’s marriage in the Best Picture winning personal fave | Director: Fred Zinnemann Cast: Paul Scofield, Robert Shaw, Wendy Hiller |
 | Seconds – rich people take on new bodies to live forever in this creepy but not quite engaging enough conspiracy thriller | Director: John Frankenheimer Cast: Rock Hudson, Salome Jens, John Randolph |
 | Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? – a married couple play psychological games with themselves and their guests | Director: Mike Nichols Cast: Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, George Segal, Sandy Dennis |
 | The Wrong Box – old-school farce full of mistaken identity and black comedy, sometimes tries a little too hard | Director: Bryan Forbes Cast: John Mills, Ralph Richardson, Michael Caine |
1967
 | Bonnie and Clyde – two young killers love fame, crime and themselves in this violent, influential “American New Wave” film | Director: Arthur Penn Cast: Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, Michael J Pollard |
 | The Graduate – a bored housewife seduces her daughter’s boyfriend; a dated coming-of-age comedy I’m not sure I like | Director: Mike Nichols Cast: Dustin Hoffman, Faye Dunaway, Katharine Ross |
 | Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner – a middle class couple’s daughter wants to marry a black man in this earnest drama | Director: Stanley Kramer Cast: Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, Sidney Poitier |
 | In the Heat of the Night – a black cop investigates a murder in the Deep South in this Best Picture winner about racism | Director: Norman Jewison Cast: Sidney Poitier, Rod Steiger, Warren Oates |
 | You Only Live Twice – Bond goes to Japan and meets Blofield. Connery looks like he wants to be literally anywhere else | Director: Lewis Gilbert Cast: Sean Connery, Donald Pleasance, Akiko Wakabayashi |
1968
 | Charlie Bubbles – a working class lad turned Hollywood scriptwriter struggles with ennui, his unmanly job and his love life | Director: Albert Finney Cast: Albert Finney, Liza Minnelli, Billie Whitelaw |
 | Funny Girl – Streisand is sensational in this otherwise slightly flat musical that never quite offers as much show as you’d like | Director: William Wyler Cast: Barbra Streisand, Omar Sharif, Walter Pidgeon |
 | Ice Station Zebra – American and Soviet teams rush to uncover a secret in the Arctic | Director: John Sturges Cast: Rock Hudson, Ernest Borgnine, Patrick McGoohan |
 | If… – dark rebellious fantasy, as boys in a British public school boys push back against the oppressive system | Director: Lindsay Anderson Cast: Malcolm McDowell, Richard Warwick, David Wood |
 | The Lion in Winter – Henry II and his family gather to fight and argue over Christmas in this sensationally acted historical epic | Director: Anthony Harvey Cast: Peter O’Toole, Katharine Hepburn, Anthony Hopkins |
 | Oliver! – Best Picture winning musical, sickly sweet and lousy Dickens adaptation, crammed with a total lack of imagination | Director: Carol Reed Cast: Ron Moody, Mark Lester, Jack Wild |
 | Once Upon a Time in the West – magnificently overblown Spaghetti Western, full of long stares and great music | Director: Sergio Leone Cast: Claudia Cardinale, Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson |
 | Romeo and Juliet – Zeffirelli reinvents Shakespeare as vibrant and sexy in this youthful production | Director: Franco Zefferilli Cast: Leonard Whiting, Olivia Hussey, John McEnery |
1969
 | Anne of the Thousand Days – Henry VIII marries Anne Boleyn: it doesn’t end well in this richly mounted but empty Tudor epic | Director: Charles Jarrott Cast: Richard Burton, Genevieve Bujold, Anthony Quayle |
 | Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid – two outlaws form a lasting, witty bond while dealing with disaster | Director: George Roy Hill Cast: Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Katharine Ross |
 | Midnight Cowboy – Best Picture winning tale of two grifters who shoot for the moon in New York, but crash to the ground | Director: John Schlesinger Cast: Jon Voight, Dustin Hoffman, Sylvia Miles |
 | On Her Majesty’s Secret Service – the purist’s James Bond, hampered by having George Lazenby in it | Director: Peter R Hunt Cast: George Lazenby, Diana Rigg, Telly Savalas |
 | True Grit – Wayne wins the Oscar as an eye-patched Marshal in a film already old-fashioned when it was released | Director: Henry Hathaway Cast: John Wayne, Kim Darby, Glen Campbell |
 | The Wild Bunch – a bunch of old cowboys rage against the dying of the light in this hugely violent, brilliant Western | Director: Sam Peckinpah Cast: William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan |
 | Women in Love – two couples struggle for love and happiness in this arty and odd DH Lawrence adaptation | Director: Ken Russell Cast: Glenda Jackson, Alan Bates, Oliver Reed, Jennie Linden |
Movie Musings 