The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

Honourable Mentions: Bonnie and Clyde, Cool Hand Luke, The Graduate

Lee Marvin is one of the most fascinating figures in post-war American cinema. A combat veteran of the Pacific Theatre who immediately carved out an acting niche for himself as tough guys and hardmen in noir pictures like the aforementioned The Big Heat, Marvin's towering figure obscured an at times haunted screen presence which seemed to stare past the camera into something deeper, a trait that was tapped into in mesmerising fashion by John Boorman in 1967's Point Blank.

One of many adaptations of Donald Westlake's Parker novels but undoubtedly the best, Boorman's film is eerily dreamlike and rhythmic - as much a hardboiled noir picture as it is a West Coast ghost story - in which Marvin's wronged criminal seeks vengeance on the crooks that double-crossed him. A conventional premise by all means, but Boorman's execution is anything but. It's stylish, ethereal, and borderline psychedelic, with stars Marvin and Angie Dickinson totally arresting as the vengeful spirit and the lost love caught in his warpath.

Bonnie and Clyde was transformative, and The Graduate had its finger on the pulse of boomer existentialism, but Point Blank is (ironically, for a film about a man out of time) irrepressibly timeless. A sixties classic that deserves a far loftier reputation.