1965 Top Ten List

Repulsion (Roman Polanski)

Loves of a Blonde (Milos Forman)

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (Russ Meyer)

Pierrot le fou (Jean-Luc Godard)

For a Few Dollars More (Sergio Leone)

The Saragossa Manuscript (Wojciech Has)

Bunny Lake Is Missing (Otto Preminger)

Chimes at Midnight (Orson Welles)

I Knew Her Well (Antonio Pietrangeli)

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (Martin Ritt)

Additional 1965 Films By Rating

Simon of the Desert (Luis Buñuel)

The Cincinnati Kid (Norman Jewison)

My Hustler (Andy Warhol)

In Harm's Way (Otto Preminger)

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (Sergei Paradjanov)

The Tenth Victim (Elio Petri)

Doctor Zhivago (David Lean)

Major Dundee (Sam Peckinpah)

Thunderball (Terence Young)

The Ipcress File (Sidney J. Furie)

The Naked Prey (Cornel Wilde)

The Collector (William Wyler)

Man Is Not a Bird (Dusan Makavejev)

Boeing (707) Boeing (707) (John Rich)

Ride in the Whirlwind (Monte Hellman)

For archival purposes, I file everything by the year it had its world premiere. Many of these films will have been commercially released in the U.S. a year or two later, so my lists won’t always match up with other folks’ lists.

Ratings are on a needlessly precise 100-point scale.

Films I haven’t yet rated on that scale are marked with if I currently think they belong in my top ten. These films are subject to being shifted around or yanked altogether at any moment, after I revisit them and they get a numeral. (Lists from prior to about 1988 are especially suspect, as I compiled them long ago from memories that were in many cases already pretty dusty.) If a film isn’t currently in my top ten, and I haven’t yet rated it, you’ll find it under Notable Omissions below or you won’t find it at all. There are a whole lot of the latter — if you’re wondering whether or not I’ve seen the masterpiece you can’t believe I omitted, check my master list.

Bumped from Top 10: Mickey One (Arthur Penn)

Notable Omissions: Cat Ballou (Silverstein); Darling (Schlesinger); Fist in His Pocket (Bellochio); Juliet of the Spirits (Fellini); Le Bonheur (Varda); The Round-Up (Jancsó); The Shop on Main Street (Kadár & Klos); The Sound of Music (Wise); Viva Maria! (Malle)

As yet unseen: Alphaville (Godard); The Family Jewels (Lewis); The Great Race (Edwards); Help! (Lester); A High Wind in Jamaica (Mackendrick); The Knack, and How to Get It (Lester); The Koumiko Mystery (Marker); Mirage (Dmytryk); Tokyo Olympiad (Ichikawa); The War Game (Watkins)

I occasionally write reviews of older movies, but it happens too infrequently to file them by year.