Films
Read about the filmsFind a film by title, director, mood or the time you have.
A swaggering thief falls in love with a princess and must turn appetite, magic, and daring towards a purpose beyond himself.
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.
A gunfighter helps a rancher resist coercion in a Western shaped by land, religious authority, and threatened family separation.
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 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 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.
A large-scale adaptation of Stowe’s novel follows families separated by slavery. Its 1927 silent premiere and later recorded-score release belong to different presentations.
A gang leader rescues a destitute lawyer, then discovers that loyalty becomes harder to command when both men love the same woman.
Two young pilots carry rivalry, friendship, and romantic misunderstanding into the aerial violence of the First World War.
A status-conscious mother tries to prevent her son’s marriage while a burglar, a supposedly haunted house, and several competing schemes disrupt her control.
A gambler finances his ward’s education by cheating at cards in Otto Brower’s silent Western for Paramount.
A young woman of mixed heritage leaves a hostile household with the Indigenous man she loves, only to face displacement, poverty, and violence.
An awkward college son returns to his riverboat father just as rivalry, romance, and a cyclone overturn every expectation.
A peasant officer’s love for a princess collides with military hierarchy, imprisonment, and the Russian Revolution.
A street photographer buys a motion-picture camera and tries to become a newsreel cameraman while pursuing a woman who works at the studio.
One ambitious office worker discovers how difficult it is to remain an individual inside a modern city.
A coal stoker on one night of shore leave rescues a woman from the water, and their hurried marriage tests whether either can imagine a life beyond the docks.
A former Russian general, now an impoverished Hollywood extra, is cast by a director who recognises him from the revolution that destroyed his old life.
A performer whose face was surgically fixed into a grin is pulled between love, spectacle, and aristocratic power.
An impoverished Viennese prince falls for a working-class woman while family debt and social expectation prepare marriages for both of them.
A young woman arrives on an isolated Texas plain where relentless wind turns social danger into psychological siege.
A silent adaptation of Zane Grey’s novel directed by Herman C. Raymaker, listed as lost in the Library of Congress’s February 2021 inventory. Later versions appeared in 1933 and 1947.
An ageing burlesque performer tries to keep her convent-raised daughter away from the backstage life that has consumed her.
Two Christmas-tree salesmen and one resistant customer escalate a failed doorstep sale into the systematic destruction of property.
A struggling pianist and his dancer partner face poverty, illness, and the cost of accepting work that could separate them.
A poor young woman forms a bond with a disabled war veteran whose isolated farm offers both refuge and a test of independence.
A family outing repeatedly fails to begin as a car, neighbours, weather, and irritation dismantle the promise of a perfect day.
A Hungarian servant’s attempt to retain her child is crushed by class power, bureaucracy, and the authority of a wealthy family.
A British officer who resigns before a military campaign receives four white feathers and travels to Sudan to prove his courage in disguise.
MGM stars appear in a succession of songs, comedy sketches, dances, and novelty acts designed to display the studio’s arrival in sound.
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