The 1960s produced landmark films in American, British, French, Italian, Swedish and other national cinemas. This international ranking weighs critical and filmmaker recognition, formal innovation, cultural importance, genre and national range, and how well each film still plays today. It is an editorial judgment, not an objective score or a definitive canon.
How this ranking works
Films are eligible if they were released from 1960 through 1969. The order gives greatest weight to lasting artistic achievement and influence, while also considering historical significance, recognition and the experience of watching the film now.
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![Don Knotts 5-Movie Collection [DVD]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/519UUc663aL._SL160_.jpg)
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Don Knotts 5-Movie Collection [DVD] | $9.14 | Buy on Amazon |
| 2 |
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Saturday Morning Cartoons: 1960s-1980s Collection | $29.87 | Buy on Amazon |
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Saw: 8-Film Collection - DVD | $15.92 | Buy on Amazon |
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Peanuts: 1960's Collection | $26.50 | Buy on Amazon |
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Saturday Morning Cartoons: 1960's Volume 1 | $10.60 | Buy on Amazon |
One secondary ranking says it combines more than 20 lists, awards and polls; its results offer a useful cross-list comparison, not a universal verdict. Polls, awards and critics’ lists measure different things and are not interchangeable. The British Film Institute’s Sight and Sound poll asks filmmakers and critics to name the greatest films of all time; it began in 1952 and is not limited to the 1960s. The reported 2022 placements below therefore indicate broader recognition, not a decade-only ranking. The Library of Congress’s National Film Registry recognizes films for enduring importance to American culture, not because they are the “best.” AFI’s catalog is an American-cinema historical record, not an international ranking.
The 25 best movies of the 1960s
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2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) — Stanley Kubrick
Kubrick’s science-fiction epic turns evolution, technology and humanity’s place in the universe into a largely visual experience. Its scale, deliberate pacing, sound and effects made it a defining work of screen science fiction, and its open-ended images still invite argument rather than settling into a single explanation. The cross-list page gives it a composite score of 7.43 (History of Movies, undated page accessed 2026) and reports it at number one in the 2022 Sight and Sound directors’ poll, number six in the critics’ poll and number 15 on AFI’s 2007 list. Those placements are reported by that page and were not independently checked against the original lists here.
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Persona (1966) — Ingmar Bergman
Bergman’s chamber drama makes identity, silence and performance feel unstable through spare dialogue and startlingly intimate images. Its formal daring is not an ornament to the story: the film’s fractured structure puts the viewer inside the uncertainty it explores. It is an essential counterpoint to the decade’s grand historical and science-fiction spectacles.
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The Battle of Algiers (1966) — Gillo Pontecorvo
Pontecorvo’s reconstruction of the Algerian struggle against French colonial rule combines political urgency with a documentary-like visual style. The film’s attention to resistance, repression and civilian life gives it force as both drama and historical encounter. Its place among 1960s candidates in the Sight and Sound all-time poll signals recognition beyond the decade’s most familiar Hollywood titles.
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8½ (1963) — Federico Fellini
Fellini turns a blocked filmmaker’s crisis into an exuberant, self-questioning film about memory, fantasy and the difficulty of making art. The shifts between present, recollection and dream are the point: creative confusion becomes a cinematic form. Its 1963 release and lasting critical recognition make it one of the decade’s most influential explorations of artistic self-invention.
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Au hasard Balthazar (1966) — Robert Bresson
Bresson follows a donkey through the lives and cruelties of the people around him, creating a quietly devastating account of suffering and innocence. Its restrained performances and unsentimental style ask viewers to notice what conventional melodrama might underline. The film’s presence in the Sight and Sound all-time poll reflects the esteem in which its radical simplicity is held.
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Lawrence of Arabia (1962) — David Lean
Lean’s epic gives the desert an almost overwhelming visual presence while tracing T. E. Lawrence’s shifting ambitions during the Arab Revolt. Its scale and craft are extraordinary, but the film is also compelling for the tension between political strategy, personal myth and the limits of an outsider’s understanding. It remains a benchmark for historical spectacle.
Rank #2
Saturday Morning Cartoons: 1960s-1980s Collection- Shrink-wrapped
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Breathless (1960) — Jean-Luc Godard
Godard’s crime film helped make visible a new kind of filmmaking: restless, self-aware and willing to break established rules of continuity and style. Its young characters’ poses and anxieties matter as much as the plot, while its editing gives the film an alert, improvisatory energy. A Sight and Sound poll selection, it is also a gateway to the international New Wave.
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Psycho (1960) — Alfred Hitchcock
Hitchcock’s thriller makes audience expectation part of its machinery, shifting the ground beneath viewers and turning ordinary spaces into sources of dread. Its precision and influence are inseparable from its ability to entertain: the film remains tense even when its most famous moments are already part of popular culture. It also appears among the 1960s films recognized in the Sight and Sound all-time poll.
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The Apartment (1960) — Billy Wilder
Wilder balances romantic comedy with a sharp portrait of workplace ambition and moral compromise. Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine bring warmth to characters caught in an exploitative arrangement, while the film refuses to pretend that charm alone makes the situation harmless. Its combination of wit, melancholy and social observation has aged especially well.
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La Dolce Vita (1960) — Federico Fellini
Fellini’s episodic portrait of Rome follows a gossip columnist through a world of spectacle, celebrity and spiritual restlessness. Its images became shorthand for a culture of glamorous excess, but the film’s real strength is its unease: its protagonist is surrounded by events yet increasingly unable to find meaning in them. The result is both a vivid city film and a critique of attention-seeking life.
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Dr. Strangelove (1964) — Stanley Kubrick
Kubrick turns nuclear catastrophe into a comedy so controlled that the absurdity feels frighteningly plausible. Its satire targets the institutions, habits and language that can make disaster appear procedural. Few films use laughter so effectively to expose the terror beneath political confidence.
Rank #3
Saw: 8-Film Collection - DVD- Let the games begin! Own the genre-defining Saw horror series in all its grisly glory. Five-disc set includes: Saw (2004), Saw II (2005), Saw III (2006), Saw IV (2007), Saw V (2008), Saw VI (2009), Saw: The Final Chapter (2010) and Saw 3D: The Final Chapter (2010).
- Genre: Horror
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Playtime (1967) — Jacques Tati
Tati’s comedy observes modern architecture, consumer life and urban choreography through carefully composed wide shots. Jokes often unfold at the edges of the frame, rewarding viewers who look around rather than waiting for a punchline to be announced. The film’s formal ambition and visual precision make it one of the decade’s most distinctive comic achievements.
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Viridiana (1961) — Luis Buñuel
Buñuel’s irreverent drama unsettles religious piety and social respectability with equal force. Its shifts between charity, desire and disillusion keep the viewer from settling into an easy moral position. The result is a fierce work of Spanish-language cinema from a director whose surrealist instincts remained sharply attuned to social hypocrisy.
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The Graduate (1967) — Mike Nichols
Nichols captures a young man’s disorientation in a world where adults offer scripts for a life he does not know how to want. Its visual and musical choices helped give the story a distinctive sense of alienation, while its comedy keeps the protagonist’s uncertainty from becoming solemn. The film remains a vivid portrait of generational friction.
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Blowup (1966) — Michelangelo Antonioni
Antonioni’s London-set mystery follows a photographer who thinks an image may contain evidence of a crime. Instead of delivering a conventional solution, the film makes perception itself the puzzle: what can an image prove, and what does a viewer bring to it? Its cool surfaces and deliberate ambiguity make it a defining modernist thriller.
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The Leopard (1963) — Luchino Visconti
Visconti’s historical drama watches an aristocratic family confront the political and social transformation of nineteenth-century Sicily. Its sumptuous design serves a melancholy argument about power: a ruling class may recognize change and still find ways to preserve its position. The film’s patient attention to ritual and decline gives its epic scale an intimate human center.
Rank #4
Peanuts: 1960's Collection- All the Peanuts episodes from the 1960s remastered all in one set. Timed to release around anniversary of Woodstock Festival where Woodstock will be the mascot.Running Time: 150 min. Format: DVD MOVIE Genre:Â FAMILY Rating:Â NR Age:Â 883929074952 UPC:Â 883929074952 Manufacturer No:Â 1000099810
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Midnight Cowboy (1969) — John Schlesinger
Schlesinger’s drama follows two men forming an uneasy bond in a city that offers little shelter from loneliness or poverty. Its unsparing treatment of aspiration and vulnerability distinguishes it from more polished stories of urban reinvention. The film’s place near the top of the cross-list ranking makes it a strong example of the era’s willingness to turn marginal lives into serious American drama.
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Bonnie and Clyde (1967) — Arthur Penn
Penn’s crime film recasts Depression-era outlaws as media-age celebrities, mixing romantic glamour with sudden violence. That tonal clash helped widen what an American studio film could show and how it could make viewers feel about violence. Its influence lies not just in its subject but in its restless refusal to keep crime safely distant.
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Contempt (1963) — Jean-Luc Godard
Godard’s drama of a marriage under strain also examines filmmaking, commerce and the uneasy relationship between art and industry. Its colors, performances and deliberately exposed construction make the film both emotionally legible and self-conscious about being a film. It is a rich choice for viewers interested in cinema reflecting on its own compromises.
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West Side Story (1961) — Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins
Wise and Robbins transform a tragic romance into a kinetic musical shaped by dance, urban space and group identity. The choreography makes conflict physical, while the film’s scale brings Broadway technique into a distinct cinematic language. Its achievement rests on treating musical numbers as dramatic action rather than interruptions to it.
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Last Year at Marienbad (1961) — Alain Resnais
Resnais builds a hypnotic puzzle from repeated images, ornate spaces and conflicting memories. Rather than asking viewers to solve a mystery with a hidden answer, it makes uncertainty the film’s subject. Its formal rigor can be challenging, but it remains one of the decade’s most memorable experiments in cinematic time and recollection.
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Saturday Morning Cartoons: 1960's Volume 1- Factory sealed DVD
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In the Heat of the Night (1967) — Norman Jewison
Jewison’s murder investigation places race and authority at the center of a crime story set in the American South. The procedural structure gives the conflict momentum, while the relationship between the investigating officers exposes the pressures surrounding every exchange. Its combination of genre storytelling and social scrutiny remains forceful.
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If…. (1968) — Lindsay Anderson
Anderson’s school drama turns institutional discipline into a combustible world of ritual, resentment and revolt. Its shifts in style and reality unsettle the boundary between private fantasy and public action. The result is an audacious British film about authority that resists tidy explanation.
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L’Avventura (1960) — Michelangelo Antonioni
Antonioni begins with a disappearance and then refuses to make the expected mystery its only concern. The film’s attention moves toward the emotional drift of the people left behind, using landscape and pauses to register a society in which connection is elusive. Its patient pace asks viewers to watch how absence changes what remains.
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Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) — George Roy Hill
Hill’s western pairs two charismatic outlaws with a genre in transition. Humor and companionship give the film a buoyant surface, but the story’s movement toward a changing world gives that lightness a note of elegy. It earns its place for making the western feel both entertaining and conscious of its own ending.
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How to choose what to watch first
- For a visually ambitious epic: start with 2001: A Space Odyssey or Lawrence of Arabia.
- For political urgency: choose The Battle of Algiers or In the Heat of the Night.
- For a formal challenge: try Persona, Last Year at Marienbad or Playtime.
- For a sharp, accessible starting point: watch Psycho, The Apartment or The Graduate.
- For cinema turning inward: pair 8½ with Contempt.
Why no single list settles the decade
A cross-list can reveal recurring recognition, but the candidate pool and weighting belong to the publisher that assembled it. Likewise, Sight and Sound’s all-time poll offers evidence of critical and filmmaker esteem, not a definitive ordering of one decade. American reference works are valuable for American cinema’s history and preservation, but they cannot stand in for an international judgment. This ranking makes its own choices by giving lasting artistic force, influence and present-day viewing value priority while preserving room for distinct national cinemas and genres.
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