The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

67. 1959 - Some Like It Hot

Some Like It Hot
United Artists

Honourable Mentions: Rio Bravo, The Diary of Anne Frank, North by Northwest

Off the back of that trio alone, 1959 would go down as one of the best movie years ever. To throw another Billy Wilder masterclass into that equation with Some Like it Hot, and you're left with a truly exceptional 12-month window.

Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis, Marilyn Monroe - the triumvirate of Wilder's most hilarious film are beautiful, ridiculous, and relentlessly entertaining, with its story of two musicians going on the run in drag to outwit the mob handled with real humour and affection.

The 1950s were Wilder's greatest years, and he unsurprisingly closed them out with aplomb.

 
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WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.