Films
Read about the filmsFind a film by title, director, mood or the time you have.
An Irish sailor enters the orbit of a glamorous woman and her wealthy husband, then finds desire, employment, and murder folding into one another.
New York detectives investigate a young woman’s murder while the city around the case continues its daily routines.
Three men find gold in Mexico and discover how quickly possession invents enemies.
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.
A shy New York heiress faces a contemptuous father and a charming suitor whose intentions may be inseparable from her fortune.
An aging boxer, one last fight, told in real time.
A volatile gang leader plans robberies while an undercover agent enters the intimate circle that sustains him.
A gifted marksman and a thrill-seeking sharpshooter fall in love, then turn their shared fascination with guns into a life of robbery and flight.
A screenwriter suspected of murder begins a romance with the neighbour who gave him an alibi, while his volatility makes trust increasingly fragile.
A London hustler tries to control professional wrestling and discovers that every shortcut places him deeper inside another person’s territory.
A criminal planner assembles specialists for a jewellery robbery whose careful design cannot contain the weaknesses around it.
A struggling charter-boat captain accepts increasingly dangerous work as debt and pride narrow the choices available to his family.
A fragile visitor enters her sister’s crowded home and meets a man determined to expose every illusion.
A disgraced reporter turns a man trapped in a cave into a prolonged national spectacle that may restore his career.
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.
A marshal watches the clock while an entire town discovers reasons to leave.
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.
A detective escorts a murder witness by train while killers search the carriages and identities become dangerously uncertain.
A pickpocket unknowingly steals microfilm from a courier and becomes the target of both federal agents and Communist spies.
A homicide detective’s inquiry into a suspicious suicide exposes a city where organised crime and official authority protect one another.
An adoption investigation exposes a travelling salesman’s two marriages and the loneliness, compromise, and deception that produced them.
Two friends offer a stranger a lift and find themselves trapped on a desert road by a killer who never seems to sleep.
War, ambition, and a ghostly shore draw two families away from the lives they have.
Mexican-American miners strike for safer and fairer conditions, while the women who sustain the action force the community to confront inequality inside its own homes.
A family torn apart by slavery carries one moral instruction across years of cruelty.
A woman returns to postwar Japan and tries to revive a wartime affair with a man whose promises repeatedly dissolve into avoidance.
Women working in a Tokyo brothel try to secure a future while money, family and changing public attitudes restrict their choices. Mizoguchi keeps several lives in view rather than offering one representative victim.
A meticulously timed racetrack robbery is retold from the angles most likely to break it.
A media heir turns a serial-murder investigation into a competition among executives, reporters, and photographers seeking promotion.
A charismatic drifter discovered on local radio learns how quickly intimacy can be manufactured for a mass audience.
A failed attack becomes a courtroom, and military order reveals its machinery.
A desperate press agent accepts a powerful columnist’s demand to break up his sister’s romance and regain professional favour.
Kurosawa relocates Macbeth to feudal Japan, where a warrior’s rise is inseparable from ambition and betrayal. Fog, landscape and Noh-derived performance give the familiar tragedy a different dramatic language.
Two sisters face a family past that refuses to stay separate from their adult lives. Marital conflict and an unwanted pregnancy give Ozu’s domestic world an unusually harsh emotional register.
A general escorts a defeated clan’s princess and treasure through enemy territory, accompanied by two unreliable peasants. The mission has a clear goal and a persistently awkward human complication.
A border explosion opens a night of corruption, surveillance, and unstable identities.
A murder trial becomes a contest over which version of motive, memory, and respectability a jury will accept.
A brief affair in Hiroshima opens a difficult passage between public catastrophe and private memory.
A young executive pursues the person responsible for his father’s death. Kurosawa carries the revenge story into the offices and hierarchies of postwar corporate Japan.
A family’s island life depends on the repeated labour of bringing water across the sea.
A gifted pool player tries to prove himself against a legend and discovers how many people wish to own the result.
A scruffy, experienced samurai helps a group of idealistic young warriors confront corruption within their clan. His methods make their ideas of proper conduct look dangerously naive.
A decorated soldier returns from war with a heroic story that his former commander cannot make fit his dreams.
A rural woman negotiates decades of upheaval, exploitation and opportunity in twentieth-century Japan.
Two women survive a civil war by ambushing lost soldiers in tall reeds until desire unsettles their arrangement.
A yakuza released from prison meets a reckless gambler, and their search for excitement draws them towards danger.
A Holocaust survivor running a Harlem pawnshop has reduced life to transactions until the present begins to break through.
An amateur entomologist is trapped in a sand pit with a widow whose nightly labour keeps their home from being buried.
An ambitious young doctor joins a clinic serving poor patients and clashes with its formidable director. His education becomes a test of what medical skill is actually for.
A late-night drink between two academic couples becomes an escalating struggle over marriage, status, and shared fictions.
A hit man caught between rival gangs must negotiate a crime world that increasingly closes around him.
An assassin botches a job and becomes a target in a crime story driven by strange obsessions and abrupt turns.
A condemned man survives his execution, and the authorities struggle to make their punishment proceed.
Love, rivalry, performance, and filmmaking overlap within Tokyo’s late-1960s gay counterculture.
Work, family, play, and fatigue shape daily life in a Black neighbourhood of Los Angeles.
New York is photographed as a romance while its adults make a series of far less graceful choices.
In a collapsing rural settlement, the return of a persuasive man reorganises hope, money, and betrayal.
A timid accountant travels west, becomes an outlaw by accident, and drifts toward a death he barely understands.
A mathematician searching for a universal pattern turns his apartment, computer, and body into parts of the same unstable system.
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