The late ‘60s were a tumultuous time in world history: the Vietnam War was at its peak, student protests were erupting around the world, the counterculture had risen to dominance, social norms and mores once taken for granted were crumbling and collapsing left and right, and the Cold War loomed over all of it. This was also a transformative time for movies as well: we’ve already written about the downfall of the Hays code and the rise of New Hollywood, but we’re also seeing the emergence of the independent film, which had been a rarity up till now.
With all that heavy stuff and uncertainty about, it’s not too surprising that 1968 brings us a lot of escapist genre films - but escapist genre films that are tinged with a pessimistic uneasiness about the future and about humanity in general. There’s the apocalyptic horror flick Night of the Living Dead, George Romero’s groundbreaking indie; there’s the uncanny 2001: A Space Odyssey and the dystopian Planet of the Apes, both sci-fi masterpieces about the violent imperfection of man; there’s Once Upon A Time in the West, which implicates even Henry Fonda in its bloody saga of America’s coming of age; and of course there’s another horror classic, Rosemary’s Baby - which ends, quite literally, with Hell in a handbasket.
To identify the Best Picture of 1968, we looked at critical rankings and general audience votes - and then we conducted a survey of renowned film scholars. Here’s what we found!
Critics’ Lists
There are many great films from 1968, but only one that stands out clearly from the rest: 2001. Stanley Kubrick’s visionary masterpiece created its own litany of timeless archetypes, from the simple monolith to HAL’s unblinking red eye - and did it all with special effects so well-executed that people to this day hold it up as evidence that NASA faked the moon landing. 2001 made Sight & Sound’s most recent list of the ten greatest movies ever made - and for good measure, it also made the BBC’s list of the top five American movies.
But 1968 isn’t just a one-film year. Critics hail Once Upon a Time in the West as Sergio Leone’s magnum opus - it also made Sight & Sound’s top 100, among others - and Night of the Living Dead gets quite a bit of critical love as well.
Here’s a list of 1968 films that show up in critics’ all-time “best” lists, and where they rank:
Sight & Sound critics (2012): 2001 (6), Once Upon A Time in the West (T78)
Sight & Sound directors (2012): 2001 (2), Once Upon A Time in the West (T44), Hour of the Wolf (T44)
AFI “100 Years, 100 Movies” (2007): 2001 (15)
Empire’s “100 Greatest Movies” (2017): 2001 (21), Once Upon A Time in the West (52)
Leonard Maltin: 2001
National Society of Film Critics: 2001, Faces, Night of the Living Dead
The Hollywood Reporter (2014): 2001 (9)
BBC American (2015): 2001 (4), Night of the Living Dead (85)
Entertainment Weekly (2013): 2001 (25), Rosemary’s Baby (36), Night of the Living Dead (79)
2001 is clearly the standout, with Once Upon a Time in the West and Night of the Living Dead not too far behind. Beyond those three, several other films also get mentioned: Rosemary’s Baby made Entertainment Weekly’s top 40; Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf also got a nod from Sight & Sound; and John Cassavetes’ pioneering indie Faces got cited by the National Society of Film Critics as one of the top 100 films of the twentieth century.
Most of those “all-time best” lists only rank the top 100 movies, though. The website They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? goes further and ranks the top thousand films of all time, according to critical acclaim. TSPDT’s list includes fifteen films from 1968:
(3) 2001: A Space Odyssey
(65) Once Upon a Time in the West
(130) Rosemary's Baby
(237) Night of the Living Dead
(259) Memories of Underdevelopment
(262) Faces
(352) Teorema
(395) If...
(481) Hour of the Furnaces
(483) Hour of the Wolf
(621) The Party
(734) O Bandido da Luz Vermelha
(761) The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach
(917) L'Amour Fou
(960) L'Enfance Nue
(TSPDT’s list actually includes one more film, The Producers, but we classified that one as a 1967 film for our purposes.)
There’s 2001 on top again, third all-time behind only Citizen Kane and Vertigo; it’s one of five Kubrick movies to make TSPDT’s top 100, but the only one in the top 40. (Dr. Strangelove, at number 46, is in second place.) Not far behind is Once Upon a Time in the West, also Leone’s top-ranked film; Night of the Living Dead also ranks highly, but it gets beat out for third by Rosemary’s Baby, Roman Polanski’s second-highest ranked film behind only Chinatown.
Further back, there’s Faces again just behind Night of the Living Dead, with the Cuban film Memories of Underdevelopment in between. At number 395 is Lindsay Anderson’s gleefully apocalyptic If…, featuring Malcolm McDowell in one of the most swaggering entrances ever filmed. And Bergman checks in at number 483 with Hour of the Wolf - though according to TSPDT, it’s not even the best “Hour” movie of its year.
It’s a genre-heavy year, with a sci-fi classic on top, a Western just behind, and two horror films rounding out the top four. Conspicuously missing from the list, though, is Planet of the Apes, which remains influential in pop culture but gets little love from today’s critics. Damn you all to hell.
General Audiences
But which films from 1968 do general audiences still watch?
There’s no scientific survey that currently exists to determine how many people have seen this or that film, so we look at user rankings on IMDB.com: generally speaking, the more rankings a film gets, the more people are likely to have seen it. You do have to take IMDB data with a grain of salt: among other things, IMDB users tend to be younger than average and more likely male, and that can skew the numbers quite a bit. (Films with male protagonists tend to get more votes, for one thing.) Also, IMDB is an American website, so we’ve noted a clear bias toward English-language films: most IMDB users are English speakers, so naturally they’ll tend to gravitate toward movies in their own language.
Having said all that, here are the ten most-viewed films from 1968, according to IMDB (as of July 10, 2022):
2001: A Space Odyssey (655,939 votes)
Once Upon a Time in the West (324,968)
Rosemary's Baby (212,469)
Planet of the Apes (178,563)
Night of the Living Dead (126,739)
Bullitt (68,470)
Where Eagles Dare (57,826)
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (45,963)
The Party (40,718)
Hang 'Em High (39,131)
The top twenty also includes Oliver!, The Odd Couple, Romeo & Juliet, The Lion in Winter, If..., and Hour of the Wolf. Further down are Faces, in 31st place, and Memories of Underdevelopment, in 58th.
As with critics, the runaway winner with general audiences is 2001, with more than twice as many votes as second-place Once Upon a Time in the West. It’s the third-highest vote-getting film of the entire decade, behind only The Good, the Bad, & The Ugly and Psycho. (To give you a sense of how large those three films loom over the ‘60s: Once Upon a Time in the West, with fewer than half the votes of 2001, is the fifth-highest vote-getting film of the decade.)
There’s remarkable agreement here between critics and general audiences. Both TSPDT and IMDB have the same top three, in the same order: 2001 in first, followed by Once Upon a Time in the West, followed by Rosemary’s Baby. Critics and audiences also agree on Night of the Living Dead, fourth with critics and fifth with audiences. The only disagreement is on Planet of the Apes, which performs much better with IMDB voters than critics - but this year at least, that’s the exception that proves the rule.
This is not an anomaly, either. It’s common to assume that film critics and ordinary moviegoers have wildly divergent tastes, but with the occasional exception here and there, we’ve found exactly the opposite: once enough time has passed, critics and audiences tend to gravitate towards the same films. (Though it can sometimes take a few decades.)
Scholarly Acclaim
So that’s where general audiences stand. How about film scholars?
We gave our panel of scholars a list of 13 films from 1968 and asked them to rank their favorites. (We also encouraged write-in votes, if there were any films they thought we’d missed.)
We used a ranked-choice system to tally the votes: 10 points for their top-ranked film, 9 points for their #2 choice, and so on down.
Here are the results, with the number of first-place votes in parentheses. (Write-in votes are in italics.)
2001 (17) 221
Rosemary's Baby (2) 148
Night of the Living Dead (1) 122
Once Upon a Time in the West 118
Memories of Underdevelopment 105
Faces 82
If... 78
Planet of the Apes 53
Bullitt 45
Romeo & Juliet 38
Hour of the Wolf 33
The Lion in Winter (1) 31
Oliver! (1) 29
Petulia (1) 10
Targets 10
Profound Desires of the Gods 8
Symbiopsychotaxiplasm 8
Stolen Kisses 7
Diary of a Shinjuku Thief 6
Performance 6
The Swimmer 5
The Party 4
The Girls 3
The Great Silence 3
Monterey Pop 3
Yellow Submarine 3
The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach 2
Destroy All Monsters 2
Therese and Isabelle 1
Performance got a write-in vote for 1968, but we've actually got it classified (and shortlisted) in 1970, so we'll see it again in two years.
Speaking of performances, though, let’s talk about 2001’s. We have 23 panelists voting this decade and 17 of them put 2001 in first; no other film has ever received more than 14 first-place votes in a given year. (Modern Times in 1936 and Citizen Kane in 1941 each got 14 first-place votes.) Only six panelists ranked 2001 lower than first, but not much lower: three of them put 2001 in second place and the other three ranked it third. With 23 voting panelists, the highest possible score is 230; 2001 missed that by just nine points. That point total, 221, is also a record, blowing past the previous high of 198 set by Psycho in 1960. (In third place is another Kubrick film, Dr. Strangelove, with 197.) So far in this project we’ve encountered Modern Times, Citizen Kane, Casablanca, Bicycle Thieves, Singin’ in the Rain, Lawrence of Arabia, and dozens of other all-time classics - but none of those films have dominated their year, with our panelists, to the same degree that 2001 dominates 1968. Few of them have even come close.
Beyond 2001, there’s our same top four again, with Rosemary’s Baby, Night of the Living Dead, and Once Upon a Time in the West easily outpacing the rest of the pack. (A bit of an underperformance, though, for Once Upon a Time in the West, which is solidly in second place on all of our other metrics but only fourth here.) Behind those four, we see a strong performance for Memories of Underdevelopment - which actually comes close to overtaking Once Upon a Time - and Faces, which narrowly beats out If… for sixth place. Our panelists’ top six are identical to TSPDT’s top six, with just a slight variation in the order. (No love here for Planet of the Apes either.)
Choosing Five Nominees
So with all that in mind, what are our five Best Picture nominees?
There are four obvious locks: 2001 first, followed by Once Upon a Time in the West, Rosemary’s Baby, and Night of the Living Dead.
That leaves one more spot and a few films that could claim it: Planet of the Apes is the obvious winner with general audiences, while Faces and Memories of Underdevelopment get the most love from critics and scholars. Between Faces and Memories, we’ll go with Faces: Memories has a narrow lead with our expert panel and also on TSPDT, but Faces gets two and a half times as many general-audience votes and also has the nod from the National Society of Film Critics.
So between Faces and Planet of the Apes, which film gets our final spot? There’s really no way to compare the two: Apes has the pop-culture cache and the general-audience love, while Faces has more acclaim from critics and scholars, plus a greater influence in the history of indie cinema. You could go either way, but we’ll pick Faces, if only to make sure we give a nod to John Cassavetes somewhere along the way: he does have better-known works ahead, most notably A Woman Under the Influence, but that film came out in 1974, a very crowded year. Better safe than sorry, we think.
Thus: our five Best Picture nominees for 1968 are:
FACES
NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD
ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST
ROSEMARY’S BABY
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY
With honorable mention to Planet of the Apes. (And also The Producers: we classified that one as a 1967 film, but it’s often ascribed to 1968 and it would have been a strong contender as well.)
And The Winner Is…
So after all that, who wins?
It’s obvious this time: congratulations to 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Moonlight Award winner for Best Picture of 1968!
Stanley Kubrick becomes the seventh director to win multiple Moonlights. The other six: Ingmar Bergman, Frank Capra, Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock, Akira Kurosawa, and Billy Wilder. Thus far, only one of those directors has won more than two Moonlights - that’d be Hitchcock, with four - but Kubrick could win his third when A Clockwork Orange comes around in 1971.
Want another superlative about 2001? It's only the tenth film to come in first on all three of our primary metrics (TSPDT's critical aggregate, IMDB user votes, and our expert panel). The other nine are Modern Times (1936), Bringing Up Baby (1938), Citizen Kane (1941), Casablanca (1942), Double Indemnity (1944), Bicycle Thieves (1948), The Third Man (1949), Singin' in the Rain (1952), and Dr. Strangelove (1964). The only director with more than one film on that esteemed list? Stanley Kubrick.
And he may not be done there either! A Clockwork Orange is the top-ranking film of 1971 on TSPDT’s aggregate and the most-watched film of 1971 according to IMDB, so Kubrick could wind up with a threepeat if our expert panelists agree. (If you’re wondering, there are four films from the 1970s that are first in their year with both TSPDT and IMDB: 1971’s A Clockwork Orange, 1972’s The Godfather, 1974’s The Godfather Part II, and 1976’s Taxi Driver.)
2001 is our runaway winner this year, but what’s second? That’d be either Once Upon a Time in the West or Rosemary’s Baby. Once Upon a Time leads with critics and general audiences, but Rosemary has the clear edge with our panelists. That would have been a very difficult choice - if the Star-Child hadn’t been there to make it for us.
Moving on, here are our nominees for Best Picture of 1969, and it’s a heckuva lineup:
BUTCH CASSIDY & THE SUNDANCE KID
EASY RIDER
KES MIDNIGHT COWBOY
THE WILD BUNCH
Death, death, death, death, death: every single one of these movies ends with one or more or all of the main characters dying, usually violently. Could we have avoided that? Our honorable mentions for ‘69 include Army of Shadows, Z, and The Sorrow and the Pity. So, no.
We saw the emergence of the New Hollywood first in 1967 with The Graduate and Bonnie & Clyde, but 1969 is the year that the New Hollywood rises to dominance: with the exception of the very British Kes, all of these movies are generally hailed as exemplars of the movement.
And fittingly for a year marked by a movement called “New,” all five directors here (George Roy Hill, Dennis Hopper, Ken Loach, John Schlesinger, and Sam Peckinpah) are first-time Moonlight nominees. In fact Schlesinger is the only one of the five who’s even made any of our shortlists, for Darling in 1965. The last time we had five first-time nominees in a single year? 1933.
What do you think? Did we get it right for 1968? Who should win the Moonlight for 1969? Join our community and weigh in!
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