Films
Read about the filmsFind a film by title, director, mood or the time you have.
A vast silent city of the future, still staggering.
A surgeon brings Joseph Merrick into public view, where care, curiosity, and display become difficult to separate.
Childhood discovery, family strain, and a world alive beyond the path.
A domestic worker’s daily labour and private upheaval unfold within a Mexico City household in the early 1970s.
Two men perform beside a recording horn while an early camera and phonograph attempt to preserve movement and sound together.
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.
The capture of Rome is condensed into staged military action and a patriotic reconstruction of 20 September 1870.
Ben-Hur’s conflict with Roman power is compressed around spectacle, most famously an early screen chariot race.
A Roman officer’s love for a Christian woman unfolds amid Nero’s court, persecution, and the spectacle of imperial power.
The revolt led by Spartacus becomes a large-scale conflict between enslaved people and Roman authority.
Love, jealousy, religion, and enslavement intersect in Pompeii as Vesuvius turns private intrigue into collective catastrophe.
A Roman nobleman and his strong companion try to rescue a child abducted during war and marked for sacrifice in ancient Carthage.
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.
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.
During the French and Indian War, two sisters and their escorts cross contested territory while rival forces close around them.
Arctic landscapes and everyday labour are shaped into an influential—and heavily staged—portrait of an Inuk family.
Dziga Vertov and his collaborators assemble work, leisure, markets, bodies, and machines into an argument for a camera that sees social life differently from the human eye.
Forty-five minutes of impossible silent-comedy joy.
An ageing hotel doorman loses his prestigious uniform and tries to hide the demotion from neighbours who measure him by it.
An English gentleman framed by his half-brother is enslaved, becomes a corsair, and returns with the power to confront betrayal.
A swaggering thief falls in love with a princess and must turn appetite, magic, and daring towards a purpose beyond himself.
A Jewish prince is betrayed by a Roman friend, enslaved, and driven towards revenge as the life of Christ unfolds alongside his own.
The Bakhtiari people undertake a seasonal migration across rivers and mountains in search of grazing land.
A gunfighter helps a rancher resist coercion in a Western shaped by land, religious authority, and threatened family separation.
Explorers encounter the mysterious ruler known as She in a British-German adaptation of H. Rider Haggard’s imperial fantasy.
A wager over one man’s soul expands into plague, desire, flight, and tragedy under skies that seem built from shadow.
Daily life, fishing, craft, ritual, and family are staged and recorded in Samoa through Robert and Frances Flaherty’s romantic documentary method.
A nobleman infiltrates a pirate crew after his father’s death, using athletic feats and disguise to prepare revenge from within.
Abel Gance follows Napoleon from embattled schoolboy to military commander in a torrent of movement, montage, and monumental ambition.
A near-wordless love story of overwhelming beauty.
Episodes from the ministry, trial, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus are staged as a vast silent-era religious spectacle.
Casanova moves through romance, disguise, danger, and courtly spectacle across an expansive eighteenth-century adventure.
A Mongolian trapper is exploited by occupying forces and transformed into a political symbol they believe they can control.
A former Russian general, now an impoverished Hollywood extra, is cast by a director who recognises him from the revolution that destroyed his old life.
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.
An ageing burlesque performer tries to keep her convent-raised daughter away from the backstage life that has consumed her.
A struggling pianist and his dancer partner face poverty, illness, and the cost of accepting work that could separate them.
A city wakes, works, plays, and becomes cinema while the camera reveals its own tricks.
A British officer who resigns before a military campaign receives four white feathers and travels to Sudan to prove his courage in disguise.
MGM stars appear in a succession of songs, comedy sketches, dances, and novelty acts designed to display the studio’s arrival in sound.
Wheat, rain, faces, and a new tractor carry a village drama beyond the limits of propaganda.
Logging in Maine is followed from forest work through transport and milling towards the shipment of finished lumber.
A cabaret singer in Morocco is drawn to a Foreign Legion soldier even as a wealthy admirer offers the security he cannot provide.
A scout leads a vast wagon train west while pursuing the men responsible for a friend’s murder.
A restless newspaper editor and his family move through decades of Oklahoma settlement, expansion, politics, and repeated departure.
Three people drift in a small boat while memory, landscape, and gesture loosen ordinary narrative time.
Two young islanders flee after the woman is declared sacred and forbidden, but colonial money and religious authority follow their escape.
A mother fights to protect her son while the city reduces her choices and judges the means of survival.
Where black-and-white opens into colour. Pure wonder.
A proud family mistakes inherited importance for permanence while the modern city grows around it.
A Canadian nurse arrives on a Caribbean island to care for a silent woman and enters a household shaped by illness, desire, and colonial history.
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.
An elderly professor’s road journey opens into dreams, memories, and an unsparing look at the life behind him.
Four geologists searching for diamonds find themselves stranded in the Siberian wilderness.
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