A hunting weekend at a chateau, farce turning to death; Renoir on the France of 1939.
Audrey Hepburn as a princess on the run and Gregory Peck on a Vespa through Rome.
An RAF pilot argues for his life on a staircase to heaven; Earth in colour, heaven in black and white.
Ingrid Bergman spies on Nazis in Rio for Cary Grant; the key, the wine cellar and the longest kiss.
A dead screenwriter narrates from a pool; Gloria Swanson is ready for her close-up.
Cocteau's fairy tale with living candelabra arms and a Beast more moving than the prince.
Nuns in a Himalayan palace, and Kathleen Byron in red lipstick; shot entirely in a Surrey studio.
The Odessa Steps sequence, the pram, and the montage theory every editor still learns.
Chaplin eats his boot and dances with bread rolls in the Klondike.
Chaplin caught in the gears of a factory, the last stand of the silent comedy.
The Marx Brothers run the country of Freedonia into war; the mirror scene.
A married woman and a doctor meet in a railway tea room; the most restrained love story ever filmed.
Boris Karloff's flat-headed monster, the first of the Universal horrors.
Renoir's French officers in a German prison camp in 1916, where class matters more than nation.
Three hours of the Paris theatre world of the 1830s, made in secret under the Occupation.
Vertov's day in a Soviet city, made of split screens, freeze frames and no story at all.
Robert Mitchum cannot escape a woman or a past; the noir with the best cigarette lighting.
Bogart and Bacall in a Chandler plot so tangled even the author could not say who killed the chauffeur.
German Expressionism in painted shadows: a somnambulist, a fairground and the first twist ending.
Kansas in sepia, Oz in Technicolor, and the ruby slippers.
Dreyer's trial in close-up, with a performance from Renee Falconetti that has never been matched.
A ballerina torn between art and love, with a 17-minute ballet in Technicolor.
Disney's first feature, the film Hollywood called a folly until it earned more than any other.
Gene Kelly in the rain, Donald O'Connor up the walls, and Hollywood's own switch to sound.
Whale's camp, sad and better sequel, with the monster learning to speak.
Buster Keaton chases a stolen locomotive through the Civil War, doing every stunt himself.
A farmer plans to drown his wife and falls back in love with her in the city; Murnau in Hollywood.
Gary Cooper waits for the noon train alone, in real time, with a town that will not help.
An insurance salesman and a bored wife plan the perfect murder; Wilder and Chandler write the noir rulebook.
Harry Lime in the sewers of occupied Vienna, the zither theme and the Ferris wheel speech.
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