Films
Read about the filmsFind a film by title, director, mood or the time you have.
The end of the world is managed by men who cannot manage a meeting.
A surgeon brings Joseph Merrick into public view, where care, curiosity, and display become difficult to separate.
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 silent-film star meets a rising performer just as recorded sound changes what cinema asks of both of them.
An ordinary theatre-goer becomes the chief suspect in a murder and crosses Britain with both the police and a spy ring close behind.
A missing passenger turns a crowded train into a brisk puzzle of memory, manners, and danger.
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.
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.
Frank Benson brings Shakespeare’s ambitious king from the stage to a compact silent adaptation built around gesture, plotting, and royal imagery.
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.
Twin sisters associated with opposing temperaments enter a melodrama of family division, nightlife, and mistaken identity.
Explorers encounter the mysterious ruler known as She in a British-German adaptation of H. Rider Haggard’s imperial fantasy.
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.
A privileged schoolboy accepts blame for a friend, is expelled and disowned, then descends through increasingly unstable social roles.
Abel Gance follows Napoleon from embattled schoolboy to military commander in a torrent of movement, montage, and monumental ambition.
A castaway attempts to survive on an island and impose order on an unfamiliar world in this British Defoe adaptation.
A landlady begins to suspect that her strange new lodger may be connected to a series of killings across London.
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 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 widowed farmer makes a list of suitable women to marry, overlooking the person who understands both him and his household best.
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.
After killing a man during an assault, a young woman finds guilt, police procedure, and blackmail closing around her.
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.
Two lifelong friends love the same woman on the Isle of Man, and a promise made before one man leaves creates a private tragedy on his return.
Sixteen minutes of dream logic sever cause from effect and make familiar objects suddenly unsafe.
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.
A Dublin family facing poverty believes an inheritance will rescue them, while political violence and self-deception close in.
A juror who helped convict an actress begins to doubt the verdict and privately investigates the theatrical world around the crime.
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.
A bored married couple inherit money, leave suburban routine for a world cruise, and discover that escape magnifies rather than solves their dissatisfaction.
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.
A vacant house, a corpse, a missing necklace, and several uncertain identities lead into a chase that refuses to remain indoors.
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 newly married couple drifts between a cramped barge and the promise of Paris.
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 railway-station meeting grows into a love affair shaped as much by restraint as desire.
On a crowded theatrical boulevard, love becomes performance and performance becomes fate.
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