Movie Auditor › Rankings › 1961
Best Movies of 1961, Ranked by IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic and TMDB
72 films from 1961 are in our catalog; the 50 best are ranked below. Top of the list is Judgment at Nuremberg ('1961), at 8.3 on IMDb. The average IMDb score across this list is 7.6. Biggest split between audiences and critics: The Children's Hour, 7.8 on IMDb against 49 on Metacritic.
Filter, sort and search this list live
| # | Movie | Genre | IMDb | Tomato | Meta | TMDB | Director |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Judgment at Nuremberg '1961 | Drama | 8.3 | 93% | 60 | 8.0 | Stanley Kramer |
| 2 | Yojimbo '1961 | Drama / Thriller | 8.2 | 96% | 93 | 8.1 | Akira Kurosawa |
| 3 | The Human Condition III: A Soldier's Prayer '1961 | War / Drama | 8.8 | - | - | 8.4 | Masaki Kobayashi |
| 4 | The Hustler '1961 | Drama / Romance | 7.9 | 94% | 90 | 7.7 | Robert Rossen |
| 5 | Through a Glass Darkly '1961 | Drama | 7.9 | 100% | 84 | 7.8 | Ingmar Bergman |
| 6 | La Notte '1961 | Drama / Romance | 7.9 | 84% | - | 7.9 | Michelangelo Antonioni |
| 7 | Divorce Italian Style '1961 | Comedy / Crime | 7.9 | 100% | - | 7.9 | Pietro Germi |
| 8 | One, Two, Three '1961 | Comedy | 7.8 | 88% | 73 | 7.5 | Billy Wilder |
| 9 | A Raisin in the Sun '1961 | Drama / Romance | 8.0 | 91% | 87 | 7.7 | Daniel Petrie |
| 10 | The Children's Hour '1961 | Drama | 7.8 | 80% | 49 | 7.7 | William Wyler |
| 11 | The Innocents '1961 | Horror / Mystery | 7.7 | 95% | 88 | 7.5 | Jack Clayton |
| 12 | West Side Story '1961 | Crime / Drama / Romance | 7.6 | 92% | 86 | 7.2 | Robert Wise |
| 13 | Splendor in the Grass '1961 | Drama / Romance | 7.7 | 75% | 74 | 7.5 | Elia Kazan |
| 14 | Last Year at Marienbad '1961 | Drama / Romance | 7.6 | 93% | - | 7.4 | Alain Resnais |
| 15 | Il Posto '1961 | Drama | 7.9 | - | - | 7.7 | Ermanno Olmi |
| 16 | Breakfast at Tiffany's '1961 | Comedy / Romance / Drama | 7.5 | 87% | 77 | 7.6 | Blake Edwards |
| 17 | An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge '1961 | Drama / Fantasy | 8.1 | - | - | 7.6 | Robert Enrico |
| 18 | The Guns of Navarone '1961 | Drama / War | 7.5 | 92% | 72 | 7.3 | J. Lee Thompson |
| 19 | Bootleggers '1961 | Comedy | 7.9 | - | - | 7.3 | Leonid Gaidai |
| 20 | Victim '1961 | Drama / Crime / Thriller | 7.7 | 100% | 85 | 7.5 | Basil Dearden |
| 21 | Accattone '1961 | Drama | 7.6 | 100% | - | 7.7 | Pier Paolo Pasolini |
| 22 | The Monkey King: Uproar in Heaven '1961 | Animation / Fantasy / Action | 8.0 | - | - | 7.8 | Wan Laiming |
| 23 | The End of Summer '1961 | Drama | 7.7 | 100% | 84 | 7.5 | Yasujirō Ozu |
| 24 | A Difficult Life '1961 | Comedy / Drama | 8.0 | - | - | 8.0 | Dino Risi |
| 25 | Dog Barbos and Unusual Cross '1961 | Comedy | 7.7 | - | - | 7.6 | Leonid Gaidai |
| 26 | Léon Morin, Priest '1961 | Drama / Romance | 7.5 | 96% | - | 7.1 | Jean-Pierre Melville |
| 27 | One Hundred and One Dalmatians '1961 | Animation / Comedy | 7.3 | 98% | 83 | 7.2 | Wolfgang Reitherman |
| 28 | Mother Joan of the Angels '1961 | Drama / Horror | 7.5 | - | - | 7.5 | Jerzy Kawalerowicz |
| 29 | The Steamroller and the Violin '1961 | Drama | 7.4 | 92% | - | 7.1 | Andrei Tarkovsky |
| 30 | Lola '1961 | Drama / Romance | 7.4 | 95% | 73 | 7.1 | Jacques Demy |
| 31 | A Taste of Honey '1961 | Drama | 7.4 | 85% | - | 7.1 | Tony Richardson |
| 32 | Blast of Silence '1961 | Crime / Drama / Thriller | 7.4 | 83% | 75 | 6.9 | Allen Baron |
| 33 | Chronicle of a Summer '1961 | Documentary | 7.5 | - | - | 7.2 | Jean Rouch |
| 34 | A Woman Is a Woman '1961 | Comedy / Drama / Romance | 7.3 | 82% | 71 | 7.3 | Jean-Luc Godard |
| 35 | Taste of Fear '1961 | Thriller / Mystery / Horror | 7.4 | 100% | 65 | 7.1 | Seth Holt |
| 36 | Murder She Said '1961 | Comedy / Crime / Drama / Mystery | 7.3 | 90% | - | 7.3 | George Pollock |
| 37 | Girl with a Suitcase '1961 | Drama / Romance | 7.4 | - | - | 7.1 | Valerio Zurlini |
| 38 | Underworld U.S.A. '1961 | Crime / Thriller | 7.3 | 100% | - | 7.1 | Samuel Fuller |
| 39 | The Parent Trap '1961 | Comedy / Romance | 7.2 | 89% | 73 | 7.0 | David Swift |
| 40 | The Misfits '1961 | Drama / Romance / Western | 7.2 | 94% | 77 | 7.0 | John Huston |
| 41 | Striped Trip '1961 | Comedy | 7.3 | - | - | 6.8 | Vladimir Fetin |
| 42 | El Cid '1961 | Action / Drama / Romance / War | 7.2 | 93% | 79 | 6.8 | Anthony Mann |
| 43 | The Day the Earth Caught Fire '1961 | Sci-Fi / Drama | 7.2 | 86% | - | 6.8 | Val Guest |
| 44 | Totòtruffa '62 '1961 | Comedy | 7.3 | - | - | 7.6 | Camillo Mastrocinque |
| 45 | Taxi for Tobruk '1961 | Drama / War | 7.2 | - | - | 7.1 | Denys de La Patellière |
| 46 | El analfabeto '1961 | Comedy | 7.1 | - | - | 7.8 | Miguel M. Delgado |
| 47 | Pocketful of Miracles '1961 | Comedy / Drama | 7.1 | 50% | - | 7.3 | Frank Capra |
| 48 | Lover Come Back '1961 | Comedy / Romance | 7.1 | 91% | 58 | 7.0 | Delbert Mann |
| 49 | The Counterfeiters of Paris '1961 | Crime / Comedy | 7.0 | - | - | 7.0 | Gilles Grangier |
| 50 | The Assassin '1961 | Drama / Crime / Mystery / Thriller | 7.0 | - | - | 6.9 | Elio Petri |
Our catalog covers roughly the 8,800 most-rated films on TMDB, so lesser-known titles may be missing. Order uses a confidence-weighted IMDb score so a perfect score from a handful of votes does not beat a well-established classic; the scores shown are the raw ones.
More years
This decade
By genre
Action Animation Comedy Crime Documentary Drama Fantasy Horror Musical Mystery Romance Sci-Fi Thriller War Western