Whatever you think the 1960s to have been like or looked like, think again. The tumultuous decade is multi-faceted in all manner of ways, including movies. But which fil💞ms of the 1960s are actually the best?

In a decade characterized by changing societal norms, not to mention the civil rights movement and the political quagmire that was Vietnam, movies of the 1960s similarly reflected a global community in flux. Avant-garde foreign imports from Japan, Italy, France, and elsewhere took attention away from tried-and-true American styles. All the while, filmmakers saw their craft defied by a new, cheaper alternative of entertainment: television. Rather than offer a higher level of spectacle than TV’s miniscule budgets could match, however, films of the decade sought to challenge aud🐷iences with more subversive stories that redrew the boundaries of acceptability. 

Like the 1950s before it, the 1960s foresaw the moral ambiguities of the near future. As the parochial Hays Code lost its vise grip, the sudden explosion of New Hollywood – already precluded by the French New Wave – gave ♌filmmakers more creative a𒁃uthorship, allowing them to reflect in their films a hip counterculture that permeated in cities, communes, and university campuses everywhere. 

With so many classic movies to name, here are just 32 of the b🍒est movies of the 196🔜0s.

32. Batman (1966)

Holy cinema, Batman! ♔Originally engineered by producer William Dozier simply to promote the TV series, the 1966 film Batman (directed by Leslie H. Martinson) now represents camp art in all its extravagant glory. Starring Adam West in the role that made him famous, the Caped Crusader does battle against Gotham City’s most nefarious evildoers who’ve teamed up as the Unit♏ed Underworld. While it is by no means the best superhero movie ever made, its summation of the famous television series – all blown up for the big screen – makes Batman one of the most colorful, most outrageous, and indeed, most fun commercial films in a challenging decade. Truly there are some days you just can’t get rid of a bomb.

31. Barbarella (1968)

A cult film of the highest order, Jane Fonda stars in a B-grade sci-fi gem whose appeal is the fact that, well, it has Jane Fonda being a total hottie in space. (And Barbarella is so genuinely watchable because of Fonda’s game-for-anything zeal.) Based on the French comic book series, the movie follows Barbarella (Fonda), a space traveler sent to find a scientist with a weapon capable of wiping out humanity. After stars like Brigitte Bardot and Sophia Loren turned down the part, Fonda hesitated over its sexualized nature; at the time, Fonda was at the center of two nudity scandals involving the films Circle of Love and The Game Is Over. But Fonda was sold when she was told by director Roger Vadim that sci-fi will soon be a prestigious genre. With Star Wars still nine years away, Vadim was pretty much right, even if Barbarella isn’t as big of a franc⛎hise today.

30. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)

In Jacques Demy’s unforgettable romantic sung-through musical, a young French couple are eager to start forever after until they are torn apart by the Algerian War. 🐲When they inevitably reunite, the frigid temperatures reveal a once-heated passion gone cold. Catherine Deneuve and Nino Castelnuovo co-star as an enchanting onscreen pair who represent the universal thrill of being young and in love, the tragedy of finding love too early, and the bitter acceptance that life will not always work out the way you plan. Of the movies that make up Demy’s romantic trilogy – including Lola (1961) and The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967) – The Umbrellas of Cherbourg stands tallest as a movie truest to the bittersweet ephemera of young love. 

29. Onibaba (1964)

It’s a movie so frightening that it scared even William Friedkin, the director of The Exorcist. A retelling of a Buddhist parable involving a cursed mask that punishes those who wear it, Onibaba follows two women who lure wandering samurai to kill them and sell their armaments for money. When a man gets between them, ancient feelings like envy and rage swirl like the winds of a dark unholy storm. A macabre picture with supreme eldritch energy, this elaborate metaphor for Japan’s residual traumas from the atomic bombs takes on extra meaning when you know that writer/director Kaneto Shindō was from Hiroshima. Onibaba was one of Shindō’s many pictures grappling with the horrors of nuclear annihilation and his own personal reality of seeing his home leveled and its survivors left with irremovable wounds. 

28. Easy Rider (1969)

The American New Wav🌳e began full throttle with Easy Rider, a modern Western if there ever was one. Directed by Dennis Hopper and written by Hopper with Peter𒆙 Fonda and Terry Southern, Easy Rider follows two motorcyclists (played by Hopper and Fonda) who ride from the American South and venture westward with money earned from a lucrative cocaine deal. A landmark counterculture epic, Easy Rider single-handedly shaped our collective vocabulary for the open road as the last frontier for adventure, and the only place left on Earth to find a sense of identity and freedom. 

27. The Apartment (1960)

If only walls could talk. In Billy Wilder’s 1960 rom-com The Apartment, Jack Lemmon plays an ambitious insurance employee who, in the hope of rising up in his workplace, allows his se🎐nior coworkers to use his Upper West Side apartment for their extramarital affairs. Things get complicated when Lemmon’s Bud falls in love with ꦿFran (Shirley MacLaine), who is having an affair with Bud’s own boss. Loosely inspired by the 1945 British film Brief Encounter and a real-life Hollywood scandal involving a producer’s affair that happened out of their employee’s apartment, The Apartment is a delightful comedy about never being too close to the action.

26. To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

Harper Lee’s seminal novel from 1960, about a principled lawyer who defeﷺnds an innocent Black man accused of sexual assault, was masterfully adapted for the screen two years later by director Robert Mulligan. Starring Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch and Mary Badham as his young daughter Scout – whose perspective provides the story’s primary point of view – Mulligan’s film version has earned acclaim as an American classic in its own right, being a tender and stirring study of growing up in an environment of prejudice. Through Finch’s unforgettable defense monologue (with Mulligan’s camera wisely taking the perspective of the jury) To Kill a Mockingbird has given untold generations an instruction in standing up for what’s right, even when justice is in short supply.

25. Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Before The Walking Dead, ⛎there was George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, which not only introduced zombies to the American pop culture lexicon but arguably did the genre best. Set in rural Pennsylvania, seven survivors hole up in a farmhouse as hordes of flesh-eating corpses have suddenly come to life everywhere. Not only did Night of the Living Dead write the playbook for all zombie horror stories, but its casting of Black actor Duane Jones (as leading man Ben) was both revolutionary and pointedly political, forever turning zombies into a dynamic and fluid metaphor for what man deems monstrousജ in its heartbreaking twist ending. 

24. Planet of the Apes (1968)

Loosely based on Pierre Boulle’s 1963 novel, Franklin J. Schaffner’s film version Planet of the Apes stars Charlton Heston as an astronaut who lands on a strange planet where mankind is primitive, and t🔥alking apes have assumed dominance as the most intelligent species. While Planet of the Apes spawned a franchise, the original by Schaffner is a towering piece of science fiction that is both technically spectacular and spiritually foreboding. All these years later, Planet of the Apes still hits hard as a powerful warning against mankind’s arrogant regard to its 🌜place on the food chain.

23. The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

Based on Richard Condon’s novel, this dark psychological thriller by John Frankenheimer is one of the defining pictures of the Cold War that capitalized on the era’s prevalent paranoia over enemies lurking from within. Released just a year before JFK’s assassination, the mo♑vie follows a Korean War veteran, Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey), who is unknowingly brainwashed by Communists and is sent back to the United States to𓃲 kill a presidential candidate. Also starring Frank Sinatra, Janet Leigh, and Angela Lansbury, this formative spy thriller’s abundant politicking and conspiring permanently set the bar for all spy thrillers after it. Its innovations in the genre are still seen in modern likeminded movies, spanning The Bourne Identity to Captain America: The Winter Soldier. An equally formidable modern remake released in 2004, with Denzel Washington, Liev Schrieber, and Meryl Streep as its stars.

22. Barefoot in the Park (1967)

Jane Fonda and Robert Redford have never been funnier or hotter than as a newlywed couple who come down from their honeymoon bliss to deal with reality’s sense of humor. After moving into a five-flight Manhattan walk-up apartment, free-spirited Corie (a delirious Fonda) and somewhat more uptight Paul (Redford, boasting sharp comic timing) learn what it actually means to have and to hold when their first few months together aren’t what either of them imagined. Though the plot is light as a feather, the film – based on Neil Simon’s play and directed by Gene Saks – endures thanks to the radiant charisma ✤of its handsome cast. 

21. Mary Poppins (1964)

One of Disney’s b🀅iggest hits emerged in the 1960s, with Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke dancing and singing about the virtues of living a more engaged family life. In Edwardian London, a magical woman flies from the skies to answer the Banks childrens’ call for “The Perfect Nanny.” 🌄She is Mary Poppins (Andrews), a most mysterious entity who is both gentle and firm, and exactly the spoonful of sugar the Banks family needs to be whole again. Technically dazzling and wholesome at heart, Mary Poppins stands as one of Disney’s most iconic and successful live action movies ever, and for good reason. What else is there to say but, “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!”