Best Movies of 1959
Ranked by our critic's grades, best first.
Some Like It HotWilder and Diamond fuse a gangster picture, a drag farce and a romance into one precise machine, and Jack Lemmon's Daphne walks off with all three.Read the review
North by NorthwestHitchcock's most purely pleasurable film, a wrong-man chase from Madison Avenue to Mount Rushmore that the Bond films spent decades imitating.
The 400 BlowsA boy runs out of options and then just runs, and the last frame stops him mid-stride forever.
Ben-Hur (1959)Nine minutes of chariot race justify the legend; the rest of its three and a half hours is handsome, pious and heavy going.