Films
Read about the filmsFind a film by title, director, mood or the time you have.
Chaplin vs. the machine age — tender and funny.
A blind flower seller and a penniless tramp meet beyond the city’s noisy surfaces.
Maybe the funniest film ever made. Still is.
The end of the world is managed by men who cannot manage a meeting.
A borrowed apartment exposes the private cost of corporate advancement.
A tramp finds a child, and slapstick quietly becomes a family story.
Theatre claws out. The wittiest knife-fight on film.
Keaton, a train, and perfect deadpan engineering.
Hunger, loneliness, and a dinner roll become materials for Chaplin’s warmest dreams.
A wandering samurai walks into a feud and starts rearranging the odds.
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.
Shakespeare’s courtship battle is reduced to a brisk contest of gesture, resistance, and coercive domestic order.
Lovers, fairies, and amateur actors cross paths in a forest where enchantment makes affection change direction without warning.
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.
Louis Feuillade turns the figure of a hermit into the centre of a brief French silent comedy.
Animator Winsor McCay introduces Gertie, a playful dinosaur who follows instructions only when curiosity does not get in the way.
Independent heiress Pauline pursues adventure while a serial structure repeatedly places her ambitions and inheritance in danger.
In a public park, flirtation, theft, mistaken ownership, and Chaplin’s Tramp turn ordinary benches and paths into a chain of collisions.
A penniless drifter finds work as a sparring partner and moves from the training gym into the prize ring.
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.
An inexperienced American soldier endures trench life, imagines a spectacular mission, and turns military misery into stubborn physical comedy.
A 1919 Billy West comedy from Charley Chase’s early directing work, identified in contemporary cinema listings.
A shy heir tries to avoid marriage by choosing a lifelike mechanical doll, unaware that the doll-maker’s daughter has taken its place.
Huck escapes an abusive home and travels along the Mississippi, encountering fraud, danger, and the demands of friendship.
Newlyweds assemble a prefabricated house whose numbered parts have been quietly rearranged by a resentful rival.
A seemingly idle aristocrat secretly becomes the masked Zorro, defending ordinary people from corrupt officials in Spanish California.
A warm-hearted American boy is summoned to England as heir to an aristocratic title and gradually challenges his grandfather’s suspicion and pride.
Young d’Artagnan reaches Paris, quarrels with three musketeers, and joins them in a dangerous struggle involving the queen’s honour.
Walt Disney’s Laugh-O-gram studio gives Cinderella a compact animated retelling with a Jazz Age flavour.
A perfect city comedy climbs one floor at a time toward an impossible clock.
The same romantic rivalry unfolds in the Stone Age, ancient Rome, and the modern 1920s, with each era insisting that love has completely changed.
Objects, bodies, city views, a cannon, a funeral procession, and cinematic tricks collide in a playful refusal of ordinary narrative logic.
Forty-five minutes of impossible silent-comedy joy.
Two wealthy young people accidentally find themselves alone aboard a drifting ocean liner and must learn the simplest tasks of survival.
The son of Zorro is framed for murder in Spain and must use disguise, acrobatics, and family assistance to clear his name.
A solitary drifter tries ranch work, befriends a cow named Brown Eyes, and eventually guides an entire herd through Los Angeles.
A Russian officer becomes the masked Black Eagle after rejecting an empress and discovering that a powerful noble has stolen his family’s estate.
A new college student copies a screen personality, mistakes ridicule for popularity, and pursues football glory with absolute sincerity.
A small-town inventor’s failed demonstration leaves him humiliated, until an encounter with a visiting princess transforms his standing at home.
Two rival Marines carry their feud and romantic competition into the First World War, where bravado meets mass violence.
A woman accused of murdering her lover turns the trial into publicity while her lawyer and husband struggle to control the performance.
Reginald Denny leads a silent comedy in which speed, competition, and social confusion push ordinary confidence towards escalating disorder.
A financial arrangement draws a performer into a plan to make a reluctant European prince appear romantically suitable.
Relatives gather in a decaying mansion for a midnight will reading while an escaped patient and a hidden hand disturb the inheritance.
A status-conscious mother tries to prevent her son’s marriage while a burglar, a supposedly haunted house, and several competing schemes disrupt her control.
A wealthy young woman’s father pretends to lose his fortune, forcing her to test whether independence and romance survive without inherited ease.
An awkward college son returns to his riverboat father just as rivalry, romance, and a cyclone overturn every expectation.
A street photographer buys a motion-picture camera and tries to become a newsreel cameraman while pursuing a woman who works at the studio.
A widowed farmer makes a list of suitable women to marry, overlooking the person who understands both him and his household best.
Two Christmas-tree salesmen and one resistant customer escalate a failed doorstep sale into the systematic destruction of property.
Beaumarchais’s Figaro moves through a late-silent adaptation drawing on The Marriage of Figaro and material from the surrounding plays.
A city wakes, works, plays, and becomes cinema while the camera reveals its own tricks.
A family outing repeatedly fails to begin as a car, neighbours, weather, and irritation dismantle the promise of a perfect day.
MGM stars appear in a succession of songs, comedy sketches, dances, and novelty acts designed to display the studio’s arrival in sound.
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