It's by far the least controlled of Penn's films, but the pieces work wonderfully well, propelled by what was then a very original acting style.

A decent piece of do-good cinema...Director Norman Jewison stages their confrontations for effectively flashy, immediate effects, though he unnecessarily neglects the action-movie underpinning.

Robert Aldrich dissects the underlying ideas with just enough craft and thoughtfulness to make the implications of this gritty 1966 war drama unsettling in not entirely constructive ways.

Well-meaning tripe from 1966, crossbreeding Swinging London and social consciousness as Sidney Poitier tries to educate some East End ghetto kids.

Tired, poorly paced Bond from 1967, with Sean Connery displaying his discontent. Donald Pleasence's Blofeld has a memorably creepy softness, but that's about it.

It's a very funny, very moving work, graced by the cinema's cleanest, most classical style.

Nothing special, but it's a decent example of a vanished genre—the small character comedy.

The music is great, and the film would be memorable for its goofy, syncopated opening sequence alone.

Leone's artful editing of close-ups to communicate the characters' spatial relationships is always a pleasure, and here he unveils his stylistic signature—extreme close-ups of the characters' eyes—as Van Cleef surveys the villain's wanted poster.

Out of five directors—John Huston, Ken Hughes, Robert Parrish, Joseph McGrath, and Val Guest—only McGrath manages to connect with this brontosaurian James Bond parody.

Arguably Stanley Donen's masterpiece, and undoubtedly one of the most stylistically influential films of the 60s.

The one Welles film that deserves to be called lovely; there is also a rising tide of opinion that proclaims it his masterpiece.

Ingmar Bergman's best film, I suppose, though it's still fairly tedious and overloaded with avant-garde cliches.

Nobody knows how to speak, but they sure know how to apply makeup. [17 June 2010, p.63]

This is so ravishing to look at (the colors all seem newly minted) and pleasurable to follow (the enigmas are usually more teasing than worrying) that you're likely to excuse the metaphysical pretensions—which become prevalent only at the very end—and go with the 60s flow, just as the original audiences did.

Robert Bolt's boring historical drama functions best as an anthology of British acting styles, circa 1966.

Roman Polanski's second British film is a mean little absurdist comedy set on a remote Northumberland island; it's also one of the best and purest of all his works.

Arguably Woody Allen's funniest movie. A riotous object lesson in how much dialogue can transform visuals, and Allen works wonders with it.

This 1966 film was eclipsed in many people's minds by The Wild Bunch three years later, but it's a good, solid job, and with Burt Lancaster, Lee Marvin, Robert Ryan, and Woody Strode, how could you miss?

Wildly funny in spots, but nihilistic in the extreme.

The screenplay (by Lewis John Carlino, of The Great Santini) collapses into musty moralizing in the second half, and director John Frankenheimer throws in the towel.

An excellent film, still as fresh as the day it was made.

Perhaps the greatest and most revolutionary of Bresson's films, Balthazar is a difficult but transcendently rewarding experience, never to be missed.

This special effects extravaganza from 1966 has proved surprisingly enduring, despite a technical quality crude by contemporary standards.

For all its implicit misogyny, the original 1966 film version of Bill Naughton’s play remains durable because of Michael Caine’s career-defining performance as the cockney ladies’ man, not to mention the memorable title tune (sung by Cher) and driving jazz score (written and performed by Sonny Rollins).

Hitchcock was incapable of making an uninteresting film, even when burdened with unsympathetic stars like Julie Andrews and Paul Newman, and Torn Curtain has its moments.

Mike Nichols had the Burtons for his first film (1966), but he felt compelled to drag in so many jazzy camera tricks that Richard and Elizabeth seem largely superfluous for the first couple of reels. When Nichols finally settles down, it's almost too late.

More memorable for its title than for anything else.