Ocean's Week: Fifty percent of something is better than one hundred percent of nothing

OCEAN'S 11

1960

Directed by Lewis Milestone

Written by George Clayton Johnson, Jack Golden Russell, Harry Brown, and Charles Lederer

Spoilers: moderate

American Gothic Week: A countenance not easily to be forgotten

THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER

1960

Directed by Roger Corman

Written by Richard Matheson (based on the story by Edgar Allan Poe)

Spoiler alert: you read this in 9th grade and presumably recall that the title is not metaphorical, but somehow still only moderate

Cardboard Science: Challenger of the unknown

THE LOST WORLD

1960

Directed by Irwin Allen

Written by Charles Bennett and Irwin Allen

Spoiler alert: moderate

G-d Week: And so will I go in unto the king, which is not according to the law; and if I perish, I perish.

ESTHER AND THE KING

1960

Directed by Raoul Walsh

Written by Raoul Walsh, Michael Elkins, and Ennio Di Concini

G-d Week: Wherever you go, I will go; wherever you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried.

THE STORY OF RUTH

1960

Directed by Henry Koster

Written by Norman Corwin

Spoiler alert: as inapplicable as ever

Cardboard Science: Suffer the children

VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED

If perhaps not the perfect version of itself, you just can't discount the cold savagery of the version we got.

1960
Directed by Wolf Rilla
Written by Sterling Silliphant, Ronald Kinnoch, and Wolf Rilla (based on the novel The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham)

Spoiler alert: moderate

Cardboard Science: If God's a-comin', He ought to make it by then

THE TIME MACHINE

George Pal comes back to Hollywood, to the science fiction genre, and to H.G. Wells, all at once, with his second directorial feature.  Happily, Pal's The Time Machine is a true classic of the genre, at turns almost hypnotic in its proto-psychedelic visuals—and, in that grand Wellsian tradition, possessed of an unsubtle but well-taken point about the era its creators happened to live in, too.

1960

Directed by George Pal

Written by David Duncan (based on the novella by H.G. Wells)

With Rod Taylor (H. George Wells, the Time Traveller), Alan Young (David Filby and James Filby), and Yvette Mimeux (Weena)

Spoiler alert: the Morlocks are eating them