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BREATHLESS. Director Jean-Luc Godard, a 30-year-old Frenchman, produced a striking piece of cubistic cinema —technically and experimentally the most original film of the year—that describes the last three days of sex and violence in the life of a young thug (portrayed in feral fashion by Jean-Paul Belmondo).
SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING. For connoisseurs of the actor's art: this muscular adaptation of Alan Sillitoe's half-angry, half-funny novel of working-class life in England features Albert Finney, 24, the most talented young actor in the English-speaking world, as a sly young dog who growls at his fate and howls for his arf-'n'-arf
L'AVVENTURA. The year's finest film, possibly a great one: Michelangelo Antonioni looks long and carefully, as if through a microscope, at the life of a lecher, at "the sickness unto death, which is despair."
LA DOLCE VITA. The year's most scandalous success: an always vulgar, sometimes powerful Italian movie in which Director Federico Fellini says what Antonioni says so much better.
ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS. The third important film produced by the Italian rinascinemento (cinema renaissance) of 1960-61. Director Luchino Visconti's monumental (2 hr. 29 min.) investigation of what happens (rape, murder, homosexuality) to a poor family when it moves from a village to Milan
THE KITCHEN. Something not often done and less often done well: a socialistic shocker. Working from a pink-hot play by Britain's Arnold Wesker. Director James Hill gives the capitalist system a thorough roasting in 74 minutes
THE FIVE-DAY LOVER. The year's funniest import, a gay Gallic comedy of promiscuities in which Director Philipe de Broca, with the inspired collaboration of Comedian Jean-Pierre Cassel (The Love Game), assembles charming wisps of humor, twists them into a pretty little cord —and strangles every libertin (and libertine) in Paris.
THRONE OF BLOOD. The most impressive living master of cinema, Japan's Akira Kurosawa (Rashomon), has transformed Shakespeare's Macbeth into a noh play loud with the wrangle of martial metal, soft with the rustle of imminent demonic populations.