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The Best Films of the 1960s Decade
The greatest films of the 1960s, from the French New Wave to the subversive Spaghetti Westerns.
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The Haunting (1963)
The only place willing to embrace those who have endured life’s deepest psychological pains in The Haunting is the cursed estate of Hill House, consuming its vulnerable visitors in Robert Wise’s expressionistic set pieces and writing out their chilling destinies in ghostly prophecies.
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Yojimbo (1961)
Akira Kurosawa builds a complex ensemble of characters in Yojimbo’s compelling narrative of rival crime lords and Shakespearean power struggles, though it is the mysterious samurai who wanders into their midst who commands the greatest power of them all, seemingly walking straight out of Japanese mythology to save the town held hostage by a violent…
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2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Through his indisputable talent as an avant-garde storyteller, Kubrick accomplishes a formal rigour and aesthetic precision in 2001: A Space Odyssey that so few artists have ever come close to, revealing a glimpse of humanity’s infinite potential through a staggering feat of filmmaking that measures up to the transcendent, cosmic scale it is representing.
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The Passion of Anna (1969)
Ingmar Bergman’s personal turmoil during production of The Passion of Anna infuses this chamber drama with a shaggy, improvisational quality, deconstructing its titular widow’s grief with the same imperfect honesty which he himself is guilty of, and bringing a raw vulnerability to complex characters straining against each other’s cruelty.
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Shame (1968)
From the moment the first bombs start falling, Ingmar Bergman descends Shame into an irreversible degradation of innocence, love, and compassion, tragically twisting the souls of wartime survivors into distorted shadows of their former selves and taking this study of human violence to its logical, haunting end.
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Hour of the Wolf (1968)
As we trace back the steps of one mentally tortured painter through the days before his disappearance in Hour of the Wolf, it becomes clear that no other Ingmar Bergman film has come this close to outright psychological horror, surreally warping our most intimate relationships into vulnerable weaknesses where demons come to play.