Public domain
A Trip to the Moon
Cinema's first great science-fiction tale: Georges Méliès's capsule lodging in the eye of the Moon.
Open Cinema
Public-domain films you can watch right here, hosted on the Internet Archive. Free cinema, no walls.
Public domain
The Great Train Robbery
Edwin S. Porter's founding Western, a pioneer of narrative editing and the famous shot straight at the camera.
Public domain
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
A Jules Verne adaptation featuring some of the earliest large-scale underwater photography in cinema.
Public domain
Intolerance
D. W. Griffith's monumental fresco: four interwoven eras on human intolerance.
Public domain
Broken Blossoms
An intimate Griffith melodrama of visual delicacy that anticipates chamber cinema.
Public domain
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
The manifesto of German Expressionism: warped sets and painted shadows for a nightmare with no center.
Public domain
The Mark of Zorro
Douglas Fairbanks founds the swashbuckler with his acrobatic, mocking Zorro.
Public domain
Häxan
Benjamin Christensen's documentary-essay on witchcraft, poised between treatise and hallucination.
Public domain
Nosferatu
Murnau's symphony of horror: Count Orlok and his shadow remain cinema's defining image of the vampire.
Public domain
Sherlock Jr.
Buster Keaton literally steps into the screen: a peak of slapstick and self-reflexive cinema.
Public domain
Battleship Potemkin
Eisenstein's montage of attractions and the Odessa Steps sequence: a living lesson in cinema.
Public domain
The Lost World
Willis O'Brien's animated dinosaurs, the direct ancestor of King Kong.
Public domain
The Phantom of the Opera
Lon Chaney and his unmasking: Hollywood gothic horror at its purest.
Public domain
White Zombie
The first feature-length zombie film, with Bela Lugosi as master of a sugar mill of the undead.
Public domain
His Girl Friday
Screwball comedy at top speed: Hawks and a relentless duel of overlapping dialogue.
Public domain
Detour
B-movie film noir turned myth: fatalism, the open road, and a destiny that snaps shut like a trap.
Public domain
Scarlet Street
Fritz Lang and Edward G. Robinson in a bitter noir of desire, painting and damnation.
Public domain
The Stranger
Orson Welles directs and stars in the hunt for a Nazi criminal hiding in a Connecticut town.
Public domain
He Walked by Night
A semi-documentary noir with dazzling John Alton photography that inspired the series Dragnet.
Public domain
D.O.A.
A poisoned man investigates his own murder before he dies: noir as a countdown.
Public domain
The Hitch-Hiker
Ida Lupino, the only woman to direct a classic studio noir: dry tension out in the desert.
Public domain
The Little Shop of Horrors
The horror comedy Corman shot in two days: a carnivorous plant with appetite and a sense of humor.
Public domain
Carnival of Souls
An independent nightmare of hypnotic atmosphere that influenced all later horror cinema.
Public domain
The Terror
Corman gothic with Boris Karloff and a very young Jack Nicholson in a fog-bound castle.