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.
Before the icon came the nightmare: destruction with a memory.
One crime, four truths, no easy answers.
Quiet, domestic, and devastating in the softest way.
A boy slips through the cracks. Tender, true.
Cool, restless — the moment cinema broke its rules.
Three friends move through the day after a riot while anger, police pressure, and boredom keep narrowing their options.
A ransom demand turns one room, then an entire city, into evidence.
A ronin requests ritual suicide and calmly opens a clan’s polished history.
A wandering samurai walks into a feud and starts rearranging the odds.
A life measured in paperwork discovers one unfinished thing that matters.
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.
A rocket in the Moon’s eye: a voyage built from stage illusion.
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.
An early French drama by Louis Feuillade, made before the crime serials that would define his international reputation.
Bébé develops an infatuation in a compact French comedy built around childhood imitation and adult social behaviour.
A migrant worker enters a mining community where hunger, dangerous labour, and collective anger lead towards a strike.
Louis Feuillade turns the figure of a hermit into the centre of a brief French silent comedy.
Rebecca is a French silent film directed by Henri Andréani in 1913.
A mysterious avenger intervenes in the affairs of a corrupt banker across twelve episodes of disguise, pursuit, and shifting allegiance.
Conspiracy, false accusation, and criminal organisation unfold across Louis Feuillade’s long-form thriller serial.
Objects, bodies, city views, a cannon, a funeral procession, and cinematic tricks collide in a playful refusal of ordinary narrative logic.
An orphaned girl enters the life of a travelling showman and a new rural community in Jean Renoir’s early feature.
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.
Abel Gance follows Napoleon from embattled schoolboy to military commander in a torrent of movement, montage, and monumental ambition.
Casanova moves through romance, disguise, danger, and courtly spectacle across an expansive eighteenth-century adventure.
A poor girl selling matches on a winter street escapes hunger and cold through visions that grow increasingly elaborate.
A face, a trial, and nowhere for the truth to hide.
Beaumarchais’s Figaro moves through a late-silent adaptation drawing on The Marriage of Figaro and material from the surrounding plays.
Edmond Dantès’s imprisonment, escape, reinvention, and revenge unfold across an unusually expansive silent adaptation of Dumas.
Sixteen minutes of dream logic sever cause from effect and make familiar objects suddenly unsafe.
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 young man working in his father’s Marseille bar loves Fanny but cannot silence his longing to leave by sea.
Fanny faces pregnancy and an uncertain future after Marius leaves Marseille for the sea, while the people around the harbour debate love, duty, and security.
Two brothers learn that their father’s place in the adult world does not match the hero they imagined.
A criminal mastermind confined to an asylum appears to direct a new empire of terror through written instructions.
Four boys return to a boarding school whose petty rules soon invite an uprising.
A travelling actor returns to a provincial town, where an old relationship and an unacknowledged son disturb the troupe’s temporary calm.
A newly married couple drifts between a cramped barge and the promise of Paris.
A mother gives up much of her own future to fund her son’s education. When aspiration meets adult reality, love becomes difficult to separate from disappointment.
Prisoners and captors discover that class, nationality, and friendship do not divide along the same lines.
A country-house farce that quietly indicts everyone.
A widowed teacher tries to secure his son’s future, yet the decisions he makes keep them apart. Ozu turns the bond between parent and child into a conflict over duty.
On a crowded theatrical boulevard, love becomes performance and performance becomes fate.
A society woman turns her former lover's next romance into an instrument of revenge.
A familiar fairy tale enters a castle where arms hold candles and statues breathe.
A doctor tries to treat a gangster with tuberculosis in postwar Tokyo. Their uneasy bond puts care up against pride, with Takashi Shimura and Toshiro Mifune pulling in opposite directions.
A father and daughter share a peaceful home that social expectation begins to rearrange.
A stolen police pistol sends a young detective through the heat and desperation of post-war Tokyo.
Noriko’s family wants to find her a husband. Ozu follows the wider household and its neighbours as her own wishes unsettle what everyone assumes a marriage should accomplish.
An older woman recalls the successive roles society has assigned her, from court attendant to sex worker. Kinuyo Tanaka gives continuity to a life repeatedly redirected by status and power.
Monsieur Hulot arrives at a seaside hotel and gently disrupts the routines by which everyone else is trying to enjoy a proper holiday.
A pair of earrings passes through sale, gift, concealment, and return as an aristocratic marriage gives way to forbidden love.
Four men, two trucks, and a road where every bump can end the film.
War, ambition, and a ghostly shore draw two families away from the lives they have.
A family torn apart by slavery carries one moral instruction across years of cruelty.
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