Some Like it Hot
Directed by Billy Wilder
1959
American comedy has never been funnier, and the Legion of Decency was appalled: Wilder ran a single disguise for two hours without ever letting the joke thin out.
★ 9.4
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1959
Showing 7 films from 1959
North by Northwest
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
1959
Every spy thriller since owes it something, James Bond most of all: Hitchcock chases an innocent man across America by crop duster and over Mount Rushmore, enjoying himself throughout.
★ 9.1
The 400 Blows
Directed by Francois Truffaut
1959 · France
The French New Wave announces itself: Truffaut put his own miserable childhood on screen at twenty-seven, and the last shot changed what an ending was allowed to do.
★ 8.6
Rio Bravo
Directed by Howard Hawks
1959
Hawks made it as an argument against High Noon: instead of a marshal begging for help, four flawed men hold a jail and enjoy each other's company doing it.
★ 7.0
Anatomy of a Murder
Directed by Otto Preminger
1959
The Army-McCarthy hearings lawyer Joseph Welch plays the judge and Duke Ellington wrote the score: a murder trial turning on an alleged rape, argued in language so frank that 1959 audiences were shocked.
★ 6.5
Ben Hur
Directed by William Wyler
1959
The chariot race took months to shoot and has never been bettered: Wyler's epic runs almost four hours and earns every minute of the nine it spends inside that arena.
★ 6.3
The Diary of Anne Frank
Directed by George Stevens
1959
George Stevens built the annex to the actual dimensions so the cast would feel it: two years in a few rooms above a warehouse, and nothing outside them is ever shown.
★ 2.3