When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences looked back at 1965, it gave its Best Picture award to The Sound of Music. It's easy to denigrate that movie, but I'm willing to defend it. I'm not going to put it on my list, though:
1. Repulsion
Directed by Roman Polanski
Written by Polanski, Gerard Brach, and David Stone
The most claustrophobic and horrific of Polanki's claustrophobic horror movies.
2. The Saragossa Manuscript
Directed by Wojciech Has
Written by Tadeusz Kwiatkowski, from a novel by Jan Potocki
This makes Inception look like Teletubbies.
3. The Loved One
Directed by Tony Richardson
Written by Terry Southern and Christopher Isherwood, from a novel by Evelyn Waugh
The Duck Soup of pet cemetery movies.
4. King Rat
Directed by Bryan Forbes
Written by Forbes, from a novel by James Clavell
"If you don't want to eat it, you can sit and watch. It's a free prison!"
5. It Happened Here
Written and directed by Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo
An alternate history in which Britain falls under Nazi rule. A story about life under occupation, and the ease with which people can become collaborators.
6. A Game with Stones
Written and directed by Jan Švankmajer
The stones of the title arrange themselves into simple shapes, into more intricate patterns, and eventually into human beings who swallow each other. If that doesn't sound good enough to belong on one of these lists, well, it isn't easy to describe the plot of a Dalí painting either.
7. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
Directed by Martin Ritt
Written by Paul Dehn and Guy Trosper, from a novel by John Le Carré
In Le Carré's bleak tale, the intelligence agencies of the Cold War aren't entirely separate—more like competing forces within one vast corrupting system.
8. Mickey One
Directed by Arthur Penn
Written by Alan Surgal
This prototype for the conspiracy thrillers of the '70s is the most surreal mob movie I've seen.
9. Le Bonheur
Written and directed by Agnès Varda
Somewhere between Éric Rohmer's moral tales and The Stepford Wives, you'll find this horror film disguised as a romance.
10. Time Piece
Written and directed by Jim Henson
You could make a case that this is more Joycean than the film at #20.
Honorable mentions:
11. Simon of the Desert (Luis Buñuel)
12. Chimes at Midnight (Orson Welles)
13. The Shop on Main Street (Ján Kadár, Elmar Klos)
14. For a Few Dollars More (Sergio Leone)
15. Tokyo Olympiad (Kon Ichikawa)
16. Looking for Mushrooms (Bruce Conner)
17. Major Dundee (Sam Peckinpah)
18. The Pawnbroker (Sidney Lumet)
19. The Return of Ringo (Duccio Tessari)
20. Passages from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (Mary Ellen Bute)
Of the films of 1965 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in Red Line 7000.