Films
Read about the filmsFind a film by title, director, mood or the time you have.
A student convinced of his exceptional right to act commits murder and discovers that an idea cannot contain the consequences.
Made in Siam in 1923 with Thai performers, Henry MacRae’s romance opens a question that still shapes its history: what makes a film the first of a nation’s cinema?
A perfect city comedy climbs one floor at a time toward an impossible clock.
A lawyer becomes an actor, masked swordsman, and revolutionary after an aristocrat kills his friend on the eve of the French Revolution.
Quasimodo’s devotion to Esmeralda unfolds amid persecution, desire, and enormous recreations of medieval Paris.
Biblical spectacle gives way to a modern morality tale about two brothers who choose opposite relationships to law and desire.
The same romantic rivalry unfolds in the Stone Age, ancient Rome, and the modern 1920s, with each era insisting that love has completely changed.
A long-running feud pulls two frontier families towards violence even as younger relationships suggest another route.
A music-hall performer’s affair with a respectable man changes when she discovers the domestic life hidden outside their romance.
An Irish doctor is unjustly condemned, transported to the Caribbean, and driven from enslavement into piracy and rebellion.
A former miner’s marriage and friendships collapse after a lottery win turns ordinary insecurity into consuming possession.
A displaced family in post-war Germany tries to secure food, work, shelter, and a future amid inflation and scarcity.
Peter Pan takes Wendy and her brothers from their London nursery to Neverland, where play, danger, and the refusal to grow older exist together.
Forty-five minutes of impossible silent-comedy joy.
An ageing hotel doorman loses his prestigious uniform and tries to hide the demotion from neighbours who measure him by it.
A man marked by a family reputation for violence becomes an outlaw while searching for a way to use his skill without being consumed by it.
Two wealthy young people accidentally find themselves alone aboard a drifting ocean liner and must learn the simplest tasks of survival.
An English gentleman framed by his half-brother is enslaved, becomes a corsair, and returns with the power to confront betrayal.
A swaggering thief falls in love with a princess and must turn appetite, magic, and daring towards a purpose beyond himself.
A poet invents stories for three wax figures, moving from exotic adventure to historical nightmare and a final pursuit through distorted space.
A Jewish prince is betrayed by a Roman friend, enslaved, and driven towards revenge as the life of Christ unfolds alongside his own.
An escaped convict poses as a preacher, exploiting a community’s trust; Paul Robeson also plays the preacher’s upright twin.
The son of Zorro is framed for murder in Spain and must use disguise, acrobatics, and family assistance to clear his name.
A young woman’s work and relationships draw her into the class display and personal risk surrounding New York fashion.
A solitary drifter tries ranch work, befriends a cow named Brown Eyes, and eventually guides an entire herd through Los Angeles.
The Bakhtiari people undertake a seasonal migration across rivers and mountains in search of grazing land.
In inflation-stricken Vienna, two neighbouring women face hunger, exploitation, and sharply unequal chances of escape.
A gunfighter helps a rancher resist coercion in a Western shaped by land, religious authority, and threatened family separation.
Explorers encounter the mysterious ruler known as She in a British-German adaptation of H. Rider Haggard’s imperial fantasy.
Working-class lives in Berlin are shaped by unemployment, crowded housing, crime, and the fragile effort to remain a family.
A working-class mother confronts the social distance between her own life and the future she wants for her daughter.
An idle young American enlists for the First World War, forms friendships in France, and discovers how quickly adventure becomes loss.
A Russian officer becomes the masked Black Eagle after rejecting an empress and discovering that a powerful noble has stolen his family’s estate.
A new college student copies a screen personality, mistakes ridicule for popularity, and pursues football glory with absolute sincerity.
An expedition travels to an isolated plateau where prehistoric creatures survive, then brings evidence back to a city unprepared for it.
Tom Mix enters a frontier conflict adapted from Zane Grey’s sequel to Riders of the Purple Sage.
Three former sideshow performers create a criminal household built on disguise, deception, and the increasingly unstable loyalty between them.
A Navajo man confronts dispossession, war service, and a romance constrained by the white institutions governing his community.
A borderland adventure joins pursuit, friendship, and romance in another screen adaptation of Zane Grey’s novel.
A wager over one man’s soul expands into plague, desire, flight, and tragedy under skies that seem built from shadow.
A fugitive called Nevada is rescued by rancher Ben Ide, then caught between loyalty to his rescuer and Ina Blaine’s love.
A man trying to prevent an abduction takes the intended victim to his own cabin — and she has no reason to trust him. Jack Holt and Georgia Hale lead this Zane Grey adaptation.
Daily life, fishing, craft, ritual, and family are staged and recorded in Samoa through Robert and Frances Flaherty’s romantic documentary method.
A man terrified by a sudden impulse to stab his wife seeks psychoanalytic treatment, leading the film into dreams, symbols, and buried jealousy.
A small-town inventor’s failed demonstration leaves him humiliated, until an encounter with a visiting princess transforms his standing at home.
A nobleman infiltrates a pirate crew after his father’s death, using athletic feats and disguise to prepare revenge from within.
A decorated pilot returns to railway detective work and finds a missing payroll, a vanished man, and danger in the air.
The son of a desert leader falls for a dancer, believes she betrayed him, and turns wounded pride into dangerous retaliation.
Two rival Marines carry their feud and romantic competition into the First World War, where bravado meets mass violence.
A woman accused of murdering her lover turns the trial into publicity while her lawyer and husband struggle to control the performance.
Reginald Denny leads a silent comedy in which speed, competition, and social confusion push ordinary confidence towards escalating disorder.
During the Russian Revolution, an illiterate peasant helps a countess escape and turns devotion into a possessive fantasy that neither class upheaval nor gratitude can satisfy.
A former outlaw hired to protect a ranch owner’s daughter must survive rumours about his past and expose the cattle thieves using them against him.
A financial arrangement draws a performer into a plan to make a reluctant European prince appear romantically suitable.
A sewer worker protects an abused young woman, and their attic home becomes a promise tested by war and separation.
A near-wordless love story of overwhelming beauty.
Relatives gather in a decaying mansion for a midnight will reading while an escaped patient and a hidden hand disturb the inheritance.
Episodes from the ministry, trial, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus are staged as a vast silent-era religious spectacle.
Bent Wade helps desert homesteaders buy a disputed land title, but the seller’s disappearing-ink receipt puts both their homes and Wade’s life in danger.
A circus performer who hides his arms becomes dangerously obsessed with the young woman who feels safest in his apparently armless company.
Still deciding? Ask Momo.
Read a film closely
Character companions, film comparisons and a closer look at particular scenes.
- Seven Samurai
Who are the seven samurai?
Names, actors and roles to keep the seven apart.
- The Wages of Fear
The original, Sorcerer, or the remake?
Three films compared before you choose.
- Breathless
What disappears in a jump cut?
A diagram of the time Godard leaves out.
- Wild Strawberries
What do the dreams mean?
Trace the clocks, mirror and final scene.
After watching · Spoilers - Persona
Why hear the same speech twice?
Follow who speaks and whose face fills the frame.
After watching · Spoilers - Bicycle Thieves
What happens at the end?
The final encounter, seen through father and son.
After watching · Spoilers