Mike Nichols made his cinematic directorial debut with this sizzling 1966 drama, a year before injecting movie history with a strong dose of youth serum by releasing The Graduate. This tense, raw argumentative character study – based on the play by Edward Albee, written and staged only four years earlier – stars Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, George Segal, and Sandy Dennis, who play two couples mired in the political, competitive and stiflingly insular world of academia. It’s a world I now inhabit, which doesn’t make watching this movie any more comfortable an experience. But wow. What intense acting – and, from a young comic like Nichols getting behind the camera for the first time, what inspired, and impressive, direction.