Films
Read about the filmsFind a film by title, director, mood or the time you have.
Doomed romance, perfect lines, zero wasted minutes.
A blind flower seller and a penniless tramp meet beyond the city’s noisy surfaces.
Maybe the funniest film ever made. Still is.
A borrowed apartment exposes the private cost of corporate advancement.
Cool, restless — the moment cinema broke its rules.
A silent-film star meets a rising performer just as recorded sound changes what cinema asks of both of them.
Shakespeare’s lovers are condensed into a brief series of recognisable meetings, separations, and fatal misunderstandings.
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.
Ramona and Alessandro’s relationship is placed under pressure by dispossession and the racial hierarchy of nineteenth-century California.
An independent young Irishwoman enters an aristocratic marriage without surrendering her appetite for choosing her own behaviour.
Gunnar falls for Tove while working at his father’s firm, but his conduct threatens both that relationship and his place in the family.
Wrongly imprisoned Edmond Dantès escapes, finds a fortune, and returns under a new identity to punish those who betrayed him.
An English traveller who resembles a European king is asked to take the monarch’s place when a conspiracy threatens the coronation.
A young woman from a poor lakeside community confronts class power, religious judgement, and threats to her family.
An English aristocrat begins a new life in the American West, where his relationship with an Indigenous woman is trapped by racial and social hierarchy.
A Wyoming ranch foreman’s loyalty, courtship, and conflict with an outlaw test the moral code attached to the Western hero.
A soldier’s obsession with the fiercely independent Carmen draws him away from duty and towards jealousy, crime, and violence.
A Bowery gang leader discovers that affection and responsibility may demand a life beyond the neighbourhood that formed him.
Don José abandons duty for Carmen, whose refusal to surrender her independence turns his desire into destructive jealousy.
In turn-of-the-century Turin, a student’s romance with a seamstress is damaged when he is drawn towards a more sophisticated older woman.
Italia Almirante Manzini leads an Italian silent drama centred on Olimpia and the social pressures surrounding marriage.
An orphan receives an anonymous education from a wealthy benefactor and grows into a writer without knowing the identity behind the support.
A reclusive man on a remote island shelters a woman escaping exploitation, drawing violent intruders into the isolation he thought would protect him.
A seemingly idle aristocrat secretly becomes the masked Zorro, defending ordinary people from corrupt officials in Spanish California.
A celebrated woman’s past and a younger man’s idealised love collide in a drama of desire, reputation, and social judgement.
Members of one international family are divided by the First World War as a carefree Argentine grandson is drawn into love, loss, and combat.
A sailor falsely imprisoned for years escapes, acquires a fortune, and returns under a new identity to punish the people who betrayed him.
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 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.
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 music-hall performer’s affair with a respectable man changes when she discovers the domestic life hidden outside their romance.
Earthly jealousy and post-revolutionary hardship spill into an angular fantasy of Mars, revolution, and desire.
An Irish doctor is unjustly condemned, transported to the Caribbean, and driven from enslavement into piracy and rebellion.
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.
A swaggering thief falls in love with a princess and must turn appetite, magic, and daring towards a purpose beyond himself.
A young woman’s work and relationships draw her into the class display and personal risk surrounding New York fashion.
A working-class mother confronts the social distance between her own life and the future she wants for her daughter.
A Russian officer becomes the masked Black Eagle after rejecting an empress and discovering that a powerful noble has stolen his family’s estate.
Tom Mix enters a frontier conflict adapted from Zane Grey’s sequel to Riders of the Purple Sage.
A Navajo man confronts dispossession, war service, and a romance constrained by the white institutions governing his community.
Carmen’s independence and Don José’s obsession unfold across carefully designed locations in Jacques Feyder’s adaptation of Mérimée.
A performer’s social ascent and destructive relationships expose the appetites and hypocrisy of the men who try to possess her.
The son of a desert leader falls for a dancer, believes she betrayed him, and turns wounded pride into dangerous retaliation.
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.
Casanova moves through romance, disguise, danger, and courtly spectacle across an expansive eighteenth-century adventure.
A fairground boxer rises towards a championship bout while jealousy turns his marriage and professional rivalry into the same contest.
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 wealthy young woman’s father pretends to lose his fortune, forcing her to test whether independence and romance survive without inherited ease.
A divorced woman tries to begin again abroad, but marriage draws her back into a society determined to turn her past into a permanent verdict.
Backstage life at the Moulin Rouge places performance, desire, and family loyalty under the pressure of Parisian nightlife.
A young woman of mixed heritage leaves a hostile household with the Indigenous man she loves, only to face displacement, poverty, and violence.
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.
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