Films
Read about the filmsFind a film by title, director, mood or the time you have.
One room, no escape, all pressure.
A town’s familiar life is measured against the absence of one exhausted man.
He owns the papers. He cannot edit the witnesses.
One crime, four truths, no easy answers.
A faded star, a kept writer, Hollywood's darkest joke.
One stolen bike, a father and son. Devastating.
Quiet, domestic, and devastating in the softest way.
A knight plays chess with Death. Unforgettable.
Theatre claws out. The wittiest knife-fight on film.
A boy slips through the cracks. Tender, true.
Childhood discovery, family strain, and a world alive beyond the path.
One woman stops speaking; another talks until identity starts to split.
A ronin requests ritual suicide and calmly opens a clan’s polished history.
A life measured in paperwork discovers one unfinished thing that matters.
A domestic worker’s daily labour and private upheaval unfold within a Mexico City household in the early 1970s.
A dockworker caught inside a corrupt system begins to understand the cost of silence.
A fourteen-minute social drama that cuts between the price of bread, labour in the fields, and speculation at the top.
A privileged man is confronted with the consequences of abandoning a woman when her later suffering becomes impossible for him to ignore.
An early French drama by Louis Feuillade, made before the crime serials that would define his international reputation.
Gunnar falls for Tove while working at his father’s firm, but his conduct threatens both that relationship and his place in the family.
Rebecca is a French silent film directed by Henri Andréani in 1913.
An immigrant pursues the American dream, only to meet poverty, prejudice, and grief in New York.
Italia Almirante Manzini leads an Italian silent drama centred on Olimpia and the social pressures surrounding marriage.
An abused girl in London finds temporary refuge with a Chinese immigrant whose tenderness cannot protect either of them from the violence outside.
A fraudulent aristocrat in Monte Carlo targets wealthy women while his accomplices maintain the appearance of status around him.
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.
Biblical spectacle gives way to a modern morality tale about two brothers who choose opposite relationships to law and desire.
A former miner’s marriage and friendships collapse after a lottery win turns ordinary insecurity into consuming possession.
An ageing hotel doorman loses his prestigious uniform and tries to hide the demotion from neighbours who measure him by it.
The montage that taught cinema how to shout.
An escaped convict poses as a preacher, exploiting a community’s trust; Paul Robeson also plays the preacher’s upright twin.
A young woman’s work and relationships draw her into the class display and personal risk surrounding New York fashion.
An orphaned girl enters the life of a travelling showman and a new rural community in Jean Renoir’s early feature.
A performer’s social ascent and destructive relationships expose the appetites and hypocrisy of the men who try to possess her.
A decorated pilot returns to railway detective work and finds a missing payroll, a vanished man, and danger in the air.
A privileged schoolboy accepts blame for a friend, is expelled and disowned, then descends through increasingly unstable social roles.
One ambitious office worker discovers how difficult it is to remain an individual inside a modern city.
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 face, a trial, and nowhere for the truth to hide.
Lulu moves through desire, scandal, and social punishment with a presence the film cannot contain.
A Hungarian servant’s attempt to retain her child is crushed by class power, bureaucracy, and the authority of a wealthy family.
A woman who killed her lover claims self-defence, until a letter threatens the account on which her marriage and trial depend.
An English soldier loses his memory of Lola, the dancer he loved in Paris. Their later reunion brings his wartime promise into conflict with his marriage.
Jean Durand’s Détresse was filmed in 1929 and released in France on 23 May 1930.
Wheat, rain, faces, and a new tractor carry a village drama beyond the limits of propaganda.
A strict schoolteacher follows his pupils into a nightclub and becomes obsessed with the performer he intended to discipline them for watching.
A cavalry setting becomes the stage for romantic deception, honour, and the pressure placed on a woman whose choices are judged unequally.
A privileged man confronts the damage caused by an earlier relationship when the woman he abandoned appears before a court as a defendant.
A washed-up boxer tries to remain a hero to his young son while gambling, alcohol, and an unstable life make love an insufficient plan.
Debt, secrecy, and coercion tighten around a married woman after private risk-taking gives a predatory man power over her.
A Chicago street boy turns Prohibition crime into a career whose speed leaves loyalty and family behind.
A bank president who lends on character rather than collateral faces robbery, panic, and a run that tests whether public trust can move faster than fear.
Guests and workers cross inside a Berlin hotel where money, loneliness, performance, and chance briefly share a lobby.
A train journey through civil conflict reunites a notorious courtesan with the British officer who once loved her.
A newly married couple drifts between a cramped barge and the promise of Paris.
A mother fights to protect her son while the city reduces her choices and judges the means of survival.
In revolutionary Dublin, Gypo Nolan informs on a wanted friend and spends a long night trying to escape the moral and political consequences.
A dispossessed Oklahoma family travels west during the Depression and finds that California’s promise of work conceals another system of exploitation.
In a seventeenth-century Danish household, a young wife’s desire and the persecution of an accused witch begin to mirror one another.
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