Films
Read about the filmsFind a film by title, director, mood or the time you have.
A Bowery gang leader discovers that affection and responsibility may demand a life beyond the neighbourhood that formed him.
Two white families are used to present the American Civil War and Reconstruction through a violently racist mythology that celebrates the Ku Klux Klan.
During conflict in the Balkans, a household is forced to accommodate an enemy prisoner, making war a matter of food, labour, and proximity.
A penniless drifter finds work as a sparring partner and moves from the training gym into the prize ring.
An immigrant pursues the American dream, only to meet poverty, prejudice, and grief in New York.
Edgar Allan Poe’s life and imagination are combined in a stylised screen biography starring Henry B. Walthall.
Captain Nemo’s submarine, a mysterious sea creature, and two Verne narratives meet in an undersea adventure built around technological wonder.
Four stories from different eras are intercut to argue that persecution repeats whenever moral certainty becomes a weapon.
An ageing king divides his realm according to declarations of love and discovers too late how badly he has judged speech, loyalty, and power.
Helen Hunt Jackson’s story of love, dispossession, and racial hierarchy in California was expanded into a long silent feature directed by Donald Crisp.
An invention with military value draws its creator and those around him into espionage, pursuit, and competing claims of loyalty.
Cleopatra navigates desire, ceremony, and Roman power as alliances with Caesar and Antony become inseparable from imperial conflict.
Lively Rebecca enters a stricter household and tests whether discipline can contain her imagination and warmth.
A writer seeking solitude at an isolated inn discovers that his supposedly unique key is only the first of several arrivals and competing secrets.
A grocery clerk’s flour-covered rivalry expands into a boarding-school rescue involving disguises, thrown food, and collapsing order.
A wealthy drunk arrives at a health spa with a suitcase full of alcohol and turns the institution’s promise of discipline into collective disorder.
A drawing teacher encounters a distressed woman in white and enters a household where resemblance, inheritance, and confinement conceal a conspiracy.
A cavalry officer and a ranch community become entangled in accusation, honour, and romance in this screen version of a popular stage play.
An inexperienced American soldier endures trench life, imagines a spectacular mission, and turns military misery into stubborn physical comedy.
At an Alpine hotel, a neglected wife attracts the attention of an officer while her husband underestimates both her loneliness and the danger around them.
A silent American comedy directed by Tod Browning, included in the Library of Congress’s lost-film list dated 4 February 2021.
An abused girl in London finds temporary refuge with a Chinese immigrant whose tenderness cannot protect either of them from the violence outside.
An orphan receives an anonymous education from a wealthy benefactor and grows into a writer without knowing the identity behind the support.
Friendship, romance, and pursuit unfold along the border in an early adaptation of Zane Grey’s Western novel.
A 1919 Billy West comedy from Charley Chase’s early directing work, identified in contemporary cinema listings.
A reclusive man on a remote island shelters a woman escaping exploitation, drawing violent intruders into the isolation he thought would protect him.
A respected doctor separates his moral impulses from his hidden desires, creating a second identity that becomes increasingly difficult to contain.
Huck escapes an abusive home and travels along the Mississippi, encountering fraud, danger, and the demands of friendship.
Newlyweds assemble a prefabricated house whose numbered parts have been quietly rearranged by a resentful rival.
During the French and Indian War, two sisters and their escorts cross contested territory while rival forces close around them.
A seemingly idle aristocrat secretly becomes the masked Zorro, defending ordinary people from corrupt officials in Spanish California.
Young Jim Hawkins acquires a treasure map and sails with a crew whose most charismatic member has plans of his own.
A teacher seeking funds for a Black school confronts intertwined histories of racism, violence, family, and self-determination.
A warm-hearted American boy is summoned to England as heir to an aristocratic title and gradually challenges his grandfather’s suspicion and pride.
Members of one international family are divided by the First World War as a carefree Argentine grandson is drawn into love, loss, and combat.
Young d’Artagnan reaches Paris, quarrels with three musketeers, and joins them in a dangerous struggle involving the queen’s honour.
Walt Disney’s Laugh-O-gram studio gives Cinderella a compact animated retelling with a Jazz Age flavour.
A fraudulent aristocrat in Monte Carlo targets wealthy women while his accomplices maintain the appearance of status around him.
A sailor falsely imprisoned for years escapes, acquires a fortune, and returns under a new identity to punish the people who betrayed him.
Arctic landscapes and everyday labour are shaped into an influential—and heavily staged—portrait of an Inuk family.
An orphan escapes a workhouse, reaches London, and is drawn into a household of child thieves while searching for safety and belonging.
A Chinese laundryman in a coastal town becomes entangled in the lives of neighbours divided by grief, prejudice, and religious hypocrisy.
Sherlock Holmes confronts Professor Moriarty as a blackmail case, a hidden identity, and an old romance draw him into a wider criminal design.
An old grief shapes a guardian’s response when the young woman he raised falls in love with a man connected to the past.
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.
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.
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