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