Films
Read about the filmsFind a film by title, director, mood or the time you have.
The 1910 heavyweight championship between Jack Johnson and former champion James J. Jeffries becomes both a sporting record and a document of racial conflict in the United States.
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.
The Roman legend of the abduction of the Sabine women is staged as an early Italian historical spectacle.
The American Civil War separates households and turns soldiers on opposing sides into figures caught between duty and mercy.
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s antislavery novel is reduced to a short sequence of sale, separation, escape, and suffering.
A Native family’s domestic crisis is shaped by fear that a white husband will abandon his wife and child.
An independent young Irishwoman enters an aristocratic marriage without surrendering her appetite for choosing her own behaviour.
Bébé develops an infatuation in a compact French comedy built around childhood imitation and adult social 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.
Frank Benson brings Shakespeare’s ambitious king from the stage to a compact silent adaptation built around gesture, plotting, and royal imagery.
Two sisters are trapped in a house while a threat remains hidden behind a wall and help races towards them.
A doctor’s experiment releases an alter ego whose appetite for freedom quickly becomes violence.
Nicholas tries to protect his family and vulnerable children after poverty places them under the control of cruel employers and relatives.
The disastrous cavalry charge at Balaclava is reconstructed through massed riders, military formation, and the patriotic memory shaped by Tennyson’s poem.
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.
A Roman officer’s love for a Christian woman unfolds amid Nero’s court, persecution, and the spectacle of imperial power.
Rebecca is a French silent film directed by Henri Andréani in 1913.
The revolt led by Spartacus becomes a large-scale conflict between enslaved people and Roman authority.
Wrongly imprisoned Edmond Dantès escapes, finds a fortune, and returns under a new identity to punish those who betrayed him.
Love, jealousy, religion, and enslavement intersect in Pompeii as Vesuvius turns private intrigue into collective catastrophe.
An English traveller who resembles a European king is asked to take the monarch’s place when a conspiracy threatens the coronation.
A Roman nobleman and his strong companion try to rescue a child abducted during war and marked for sacrifice in ancient Carthage.
Sherlock Holmes investigates a family curse, a threatening hound, and danger surrounding the heir to Baskerville Hall.
Animator Winsor McCay introduces Gertie, a playful dinosaur who follows instructions only when curiosity does not get in the way.
A young woman from a poor lakeside community confronts class power, religious judgement, and threats to her family.
Independent heiress Pauline pursues adventure while a serial structure repeatedly places her ambitions and inheritance in danger.
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.
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s antislavery story is condensed into episodes of sale, separation, escape, violence, and religious endurance.
Alice follows the White Rabbit into a world of changing size, abrupt rules, and encounters drawn from both Alice books.
A soldier’s obsession with the fiercely independent Carmen draws him away from duty and towards jealousy, crime, and violence.
In a public park, flirtation, theft, mistaken ownership, and Chaplin’s Tramp turn ordinary benches and paths into a chain of collisions.
A Bowery gang leader discovers that affection and responsibility may demand a life beyond the neighbourhood that formed him.
Two white families are used to present the American Civil War and Reconstruction through a violently racist mythology that celebrates the Ku Klux Klan.
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.
An immigrant pursues the American dream, only to meet poverty, prejudice, and grief in New York.
Edgar Allan Poe’s life and imagination are combined in a stylised screen biography starring Henry B. Walthall.
Captain Nemo’s submarine, a mysterious sea creature, and two Verne narratives meet in an undersea adventure built around technological wonder.
Four stories from different eras are intercut to argue that persecution repeats whenever moral certainty becomes a weapon.
A mysterious avenger intervenes in the affairs of a corrupt banker across twelve episodes of disguise, pursuit, and shifting allegiance.
An ageing king divides his realm according to declarations of love and discovers too late how badly he has judged speech, loyalty, and power.
Helen Hunt Jackson’s story of love, dispossession, and racial hierarchy in California was expanded into a long silent feature directed by Donald Crisp.
An invention with military value draws its creator and those around him into espionage, pursuit, and competing claims of loyalty.
Cleopatra navigates desire, ceremony, and Roman power as alliances with Caesar and Antony become inseparable from imperial conflict.
Lively Rebecca enters a stricter household and tests whether discipline can contain her imagination and warmth.
A writer seeking solitude at an isolated inn discovers that his supposedly unique key is only the first of several arrivals and competing secrets.
A grocery clerk’s flour-covered rivalry expands into a boarding-school rescue involving disguises, thrown food, and collapsing order.
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.
A drawing teacher encounters a distressed woman in white and enters a household where resemblance, inheritance, and confinement conceal a conspiracy.
A cavalry officer and a ranch community become entangled in accusation, honour, and romance in this screen version of a popular stage play.
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 inexperienced American soldier endures trench life, imagines a spectacular mission, and turns military misery into stubborn physical comedy.
Conspiracy, false accusation, and criminal organisation unfold across Louis Feuillade’s long-form thriller serial.
At an Alpine hotel, a neglected wife attracts the attention of an officer while her husband underestimates both her loneliness and the danger around them.
A silent American comedy directed by Tod Browning, included in the Library of Congress’s lost-film list dated 4 February 2021.
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