Not many movies manage to be timeless while remaining grounded in the time of their creation. The Graduate just feels like 1967: a transitional moment in American culture between the end of the post-WW2 boom and the rise of the hippie counterculture. It was a transitional moment in American movies, too, and it’s full of radical filmmaking techniques — crash zooms and shocking framing. But the subject of The Graduate is a transition we all undergo; Dustin Hoffman plays a college grad in the delicate shift from adolescence to adulthood, torn between his feelings for his girlfriend’s mother (Anne Bancroft as the famous Mrs. Robinson) and his fear of the future. It’s about being told what to do, then suddenly having to decide for ourselves; the people we fall in love with, when we’re not supposed to; all the mistakes we make, and apologize for, and sometimes make again.