Cinema60 is back with a ghost guest in order to highlight some notable opinions on film. Dwight Macdonald, a celebrity film critic of the ‘50s and ‘60s who is now more remembered as a cultural critic and political pundit, had a lot to say about the dumbing down of high art to appeal to middlebrow tastes. Championing films that challenged audiences,…

For the first half of the 1960s, Akira Kurosawa was arguably at the peak of his career, making masterpiece after masterpiece at a rate that was sure to surpass the heights of his ‘50s glories. But then, after making the most beloved film of his career, he hit a wall. There would be several more great films to come, but for a while there it seemed l…

Bart and Jenna want to tell you what their favorites films from 1962 are, but the catch is that the films can only be selected from films covered on Cinema60 so far! But first, they’re going to talk about six films from 1961 that they’ve chosen to watch in hopes that they can snazz up their Top Tens with some bonus bangers. (Aka, basically it’s jus…

Following in the tradition of our episodes on Ukraine and Egypt, where we tried to find our way into national cinemas that are virtually inaccessible in the West (not to mention our other single-nation episodes on Poland, Brazil, Hong Kong, West Germany, Japan, Czechoslovakia and Mexico that focus more narrowly on a single movement or genre), we ga…

What-ho, Cinema60 fans! Six seasons we hath returned, recorded, and bearing our newfangled episodes. In this, our triumphant premiere we speaketh, perchance to wax lyrical, about the works of The Bard – on this April 23, his day of birth! Well enow, we'll cease our foolishness. But there were quite a few direct Shakespeare adaptations in the decade…

When A Hard Days Night exploded onto the scene in 1964, its charm and success was simply ripe for some good ol’ fashioned bootlegging. What followed was half a decade of wannabe music movies – specifically, movies in which pop bands play themselves while still following a strictly scripted plot. Mainly these were vehicles for British boy bands, but…

In a follow up to the Ukrainian National Cinema episode, Cinema60 finally addresses the beautiful, surreal and unfairly banned films of Sergei Parajanov and Yuri Ilyenko – two figures that are essential to the story of what was getting made in that region while it was under Soviet control. In the case of Parajanov, his films of the ‘60s are amongst…

In 1966, somewhere along the United States-Mexico border, a man wearing a tattered Union uniform drags a coffin across the desert… and into the hearts of the Italian moviegoing public. What was it about this mix of blood, violence, sweaty masculine tusslin’, and steely blue eyes? With just one film, Sergio Corbucci inspired over thirty five remakes…

Bart and Jenna want to tell you what their favorites films from 1961 are, but the catch is that the films can only be selected from films covered on Cinema60 so far! But first, they’re going to talk about six films from 1961 that they’ve chosen to watch in hopes that they can snazz up their Top Tens with some bonus bangers. (Aka, basically it’s jus…

Once again, Cinema60 communes with the dead in order to highlight some notable opinions on film. Tonight’s ghost guest is Susan Sontag and her seminal Sight and Sound review on Ingmar Bergman’s Persona. Known primarily as an author, filmmaker and intellect, in the 1960s Sontag was just beginning her illustrious career as a writer – her essay “Notes…

Here at Cinema60 we’ve embraced the endless task of putting a pin in the entirety of Sixties cinema. However, one area where we have been remiss in our duties is documentaries – a genre that truly came into its own during this decade. Films like Robert Drew’s Primary and Jean Rouch & Edgar Morin’s Chronicle of a Summer began to break from the popul…

Bart and Jenna are rarely afraid to dive headfirst into uncharted areas of cinema, but certain movies are just too important for them to toss around in their usual subjective way. Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers is one such landmark work that seems irresponsible to discuss without a maximum amount of context. That’s why Cinema60 invited Af…

In the immortal words of Betty Rizzo: “Watch it, hey, I’m Doris Day – I was not brought up that way!” While teen stars could always be counted on to keep their pants on in the dying days of Old Hollywood comedy, Doris Day was a unique figure in that she played adult working women who were continually thrown into the most lustful of situations, and …

In the year 1960, Federico Fellini premiered La Dolce Vita and changed cinema forever. That sounds like hyperbole but it’s really just fact; it was the film that not only spawned a thousand knock-offs, both contemporary and legacy, but launched Fellini’s own career into the stratosphere. Known for his dream-like films, fantastical visuals, introspe…

After Godzilla leapt to the big screen in 1954, he quickly became Japan’s most recognizable pop culture expression of lasting trauma and remorse over the nuclear end of their involvement in WWII. In the 1960s, Godzilla-inspired kaiju movies took this same metaphor of an unstoppable destructive force that indiscriminately kills both the innocent and…

Having already gotten to the end of the decade while playing Kiss Marry Kill, it was time for a change. Welcome to Top Ten, where Bart and Jenna each choose three movies – one they think they’ll love, one they know they love, and one wildcard choice – in hopes of adding to their top ten ranking of the year in question. So… not terribly dissimilar t…

The legendary Harry Alan Towers: independent film producer, part-time pimp and full-time opportunist. Britain’s answer to Roger Corman, Towers started off the 60s believing that your brain is the most powerful sexual organ. By the end of the Sixties, he accepted – like everybody else in the biz did – that, nope, your junk is. Turned on by the liter…

In search of thought provoking astral projections from across the galaxy, the USS KINO60 has launched triumphantly for what will be remembered as a utopian journey through the stars. Cosmonauts Bart and Jenna have reported some bumpy viewing conditions and unstable nuke-happy alien civilizations, but for the most part their mission has remained sty…

Kicking off our fifth season are the films of Robert Wise, arguably the most important director of the sixties – that is if you’re going by box office profits. Despite the musical genre not being one he ever associated with before this decade, Wise almost single-handedly shaped the evolution of the Hollywood Musical. Previously known for his noirs …

Starting in the mid 1940s and continuing through the 1960s, Egypt experienced a Golden Age of cinema. With the third largest private film production system in the world, Egypt acted as Hollywood to most all Arabic speaking countries; producing commercially minded hit after hit, with crowd pleasing stories, star players and big wig directors. Yet, a…

The Korean War is aptly known in America as the “Forgotten War.” During the 1960s, the subject took in its last cinematic hurrah before getting overshadowed by the rising unpopularity of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Meanwhile, South Korea was experiencing a fabled “Golden Age” of cinema that followed the civil war and continued into th…

With a starting list of over 15,000 features and documentaries to choose from, it’s unlikely that the Cinema60 team will ever run out of movies to watch and discuss from their chosen decade. But Bart and Jenna have crossed a significant finish line with today’s episode. Starting with Episode 5 back in March of 2019, Cinema60 has regularly put out “…

Partially due to his desire to not get typecast after his most famous role, as well an urge to escape the pressure put on him by the studios to not be so ‘out’ about his homosexuality, Perkins ran away from Hollywood and ended up having one of the strangest careers of any major star in the 60s. Fortunately, his self-imposed exile in France resulted…

We’re back in the world of Bootleg Bond, navigating the vast number of rip-offs and spoofs that tried to cash in on the 007 craze. In this episode, Cinema60 goes to Italy to scout out Agent 077 – the ever forgettable Eurospy with the ever changing name and face. Marvel as he shoots men, slaps women, skis mountains, flies helicopters, saves the worl…

In many ways, the story of Francis Ford Coppola in the 1960s is a true parallel to the story of the dissolution and subsequent restructuring of Hollywood throughout the decade. Coppola got into the film industry quickly after graduating college, he started in nudie flicks and worked his way up through various low budget Roger Corman pictures. After…