The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

63. 1963 - 8½

8½ Fellini
Columbia Pictures

Honourable Mentions: High and Low, The Great Escape, The Leopard

The opus of the great Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini, and one of the greatest movies about the movies ever made, 8½ won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in the wake of its 1963 release and has remained a touchstone of Italian cinema in the six decades since.

StarringMarcello Mastroianni as an embattled director engulfed by creative and personal crises during the production of his next big film, Fellini's film was whipsmart, suave, and scathingly frank in its depiction of existential drama, bolstered by the stunning black-and-white photography of Gianni Di Venanzo and stellar supporting turns from Sandra Milo and the late, great Claudia Cardinale.

 
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Content Producer/Presenter

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.