Films
Read about the filmsFind a film by title, director, mood or the time you have.
Three hours that fly. The template for the epic.
A town’s familiar life is measured against the absence of one exhausted man.
A blind flower seller and a penniless tramp meet beyond the city’s noisy surfaces.
A surgeon brings Joseph Merrick into public view, where care, curiosity, and display become difficult to separate.
A tramp finds a child, and slapstick quietly becomes a family story.
One stolen bike, a father and son. Devastating.
Quiet, domestic, and devastating in the softest way.
Hunger, loneliness, and a dinner roll become materials for Chaplin’s warmest dreams.
A boy slips through the cracks. Tender, true.
Childhood discovery, family strain, and a world alive beyond the path.
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 silent-film star meets a rising performer just as recorded sound changes what cinema asks of both of them.
Episodes from the life and Passion of Christ are arranged as a succession of brief, carefully staged tableaux.
Ebenezer Scrooge is confronted by Marley’s ghost and visions that compress Dickens’s Christmas story into a few inventive minutes.
The life of Christ unfolds through an extended series of theatrical scenes, from the Nativity to the Passion and Resurrection.
A spinner’s legend is presented as a compact piece of visual folklore in an early film by Louis Feuillade.
Oliver’s passage through poverty, exploitation, and criminal pressure is compressed into an early silent adaptation of Dickens’s novel.
A Native family’s domestic crisis is shaped by fear that a white husband will abandon his wife and child.
Bébé develops an infatuation in a compact French comedy built around childhood imitation and adult social behaviour.
Nicholas tries to protect his family and vulnerable children after poverty places them under the control of cruel employers and relatives.
Animator Winsor McCay introduces Gertie, a playful dinosaur who follows instructions only when curiosity does not get in the way.
Alice follows the White Rabbit into a world of changing size, abrupt rules, and encounters drawn from both Alice books.
In a public park, flirtation, theft, mistaken ownership, and Chaplin’s Tramp turn ordinary benches and paths into a chain of collisions.
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.
Lively Rebecca enters a stricter household and tests whether discipline can contain her imagination and warmth.
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.
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.
A 1919 Billy West comedy from Charley Chase’s early directing work, identified in contemporary cinema listings.
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.
A warm-hearted American boy is summoned to England as heir to an aristocratic title and gradually challenges his grandfather’s suspicion and pride.
Walt Disney’s Laugh-O-gram studio gives Cinderella a compact animated retelling with a Jazz Age flavour.
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.
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 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.
Two wealthy young people accidentally find themselves alone aboard a drifting ocean liner and must learn the simplest tasks of survival.
A solitary drifter tries ranch work, befriends a cow named Brown Eyes, and eventually guides an entire herd through Los Angeles.
An idle young American enlists for the First World War, forms friendships in France, and discovers how quickly adventure becomes loss.
A new college student copies a screen personality, mistakes ridicule for popularity, and pursues football glory with absolute sincerity.
An orphaned girl enters the life of a travelling showman and a new rural community in Jean Renoir’s early feature.
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 castaway attempts to survive on an island and impose order on an unfamiliar world in this British Defoe adaptation.
A sewer worker protects an abused young woman, and their attic home becomes a promise tested by war and separation.
An awkward college son returns to his riverboat father just as rivalry, romance, and a cyclone overturn every expectation.
One ambitious office worker discovers how difficult it is to remain an individual inside a modern city.
A widowed farmer makes a list of suitable women to marry, overlooking the person who understands both him and his household best.
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.
Jean Durand’s Détresse was filmed in 1929 and released in France on 23 May 1930.
After an underground disaster, German miners cross the border to rescue French workers despite the political divisions above them.
A travelling cowboy enters a compact Western of danger, assistance, and conflict built around Tom Tyler’s direct screen presence.
Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, and their friends enter a loose adventure drawn from Mark Twain but reshaped around child-star comedy.
A young man working in his father’s Marseille bar loves Fanny but cannot silence his longing to leave by sea.
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