The Graduate is what shot Mike Nichols out of a cannon – as a filmmaker, at least; he’d already had huge success as a comedy star and theatre director – but his actual film debut came a year prior, with this 1966 adaptation of Edward Albee’s Tony award-winning play. It’s a blistering portrait of a marriage soured by grief and disdain, set over the course of a disaster of a dinner party. Elizabeth Taylor – only 33 at the time, but plausibly aged up and chewed up – and her real-life then-husband Richard Burton play the toxic older couple, while Sandy Dennis and George Segal are newlyweds in the splash zone of Taylor and Burton’s bilious sparring. – Kimberley Jones
