Release Date: 1903-12-07

Overview: After the train station clerk is assaulted and left bound and gagged, then the departing train and its passengers robbed, a posse goes in hot pursuit of the fleeing bandits.

Rating: 7.012 (646 votes)

Release Date: 1904-11-10

Overview: Using every known means of transportation, several savants from the Geographic Society undertake a journey through the Alps to the Sun which finishes under the sea.

Rating: 7.224 (194 votes)

Release Date: 1896-06-30

Overview: A group of people are standing along the platform of a railway station in La Ciotat, waiting for a train. One is seen coming, at some distance, and eventually stops at the platform. Doors of the railway-cars open and attendants help passengers off and on. Popular legend has it that, when this film was shown, the first-night audience fled the café in terror, fearing being run over by the "approaching" train. This legend has since been identified as promotional embellishment, though there is evidence to suggest that people were astounded at the capabilities of the Lumières' cinématographe.

Rating: 7.089 (497 votes)

Release Date: 1898-11-30

Overview: One of the greatest of black art pictures. The conjurer appears before the audience, with his head in its proper place. He then removes his head, and throwing it in the air, it appears on the table opposite another head, and both detached heads sing in unison. The conjurer then removes it a third time. You then see all three of his heads, which are exact duplicates, upon the table at one time, while the conjurer again stands before the audience with his head perfectly intact, singing in unison with the three heads upon the table. He closes the picture by bowing himself from the stage.

Rating: 7.179 (173 votes)

Release Date: 1898-01-01

Overview: An astronomer has a terrifying dream.

Rating: 6.892 (209 votes)

Release Date: 1903-01-21

Overview: Porter's sequential continuity editing links several shots to form a narrative of firemen responding to a house fire. They leave the station with their horse drawn pumper, arrive on the scene, and effect the safe rescue of a woman from the burning house. But wait, she tells them of her child yet asleep in the burning bedroom...

Rating: 5.996 (124 votes)

Release Date: 1920-02-27

Overview: Francis, a young man, recalls in his memory the horrible experiences he and his fiancée Jane recently went through. Francis and his friend Alan visit The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, an exhibit where the mysterious doctor shows the somnambulist Cesare, and awakens him for some moments from his death-like sleep.

Rating: 7.9 (1663 votes)

Release Date: 1915-03-08

Overview: Two families, abolitionist Northerners the Stonemans and Southern landowners the Camerons, intertwine. When Confederate colonel Ben Cameron is captured in battle, nurse Elsie Stoneman petitions for his pardon. In Reconstruction-era South Carolina, Cameron founds the Ku Klux Klan, battling Elsie's congressman father and his African-American protégé, Silas Lynch.

Rating: 6.008 (554 votes)

Release Date: 2011-12-08

Overview: An account of the extraordinary life of film pioneer Georges Méliès (1861-1938) and the amazing story of the copy in color of his masterpiece A Trip to the Moon (1902), unexpectedly found in Spain and restored thanks to the heroic efforts of a group of true cinema lovers.

Rating: 7.769 (52 votes)

Release Date: 1903-07-25

Overview: At the royal court, a prince is presenting the princess whom he is pledged to marry when a witch suddenly appears. Though driven off, the witch soon returns, summons some of her servants, and carries off the princess. A rescue party is quickly organized, but the unfortunate captive has been taken to a strange, forbidding realm, from where it will be impossible to rescue her without some special help.

Rating: 6.9 (85 votes)

Release Date: 1896-03-31

Overview: A brief fantasy tale involving a strange fairy who can produce and deliver babies coming out of cabbages. This film is lost or never existed. Copies of it online are actually the 1900 remake.

Rating: 5.21 (93 votes)

Release Date: 1929-06-05

Overview: Un Chien Andalou is an European avant-garde surrealist film, a collaboration between director Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali.

Rating: 7.421 (1336 votes)

Release Date: 1962-02-16

Overview: A man confronts his past during an experiment that attempts to find a solution to the problems of a post-apocalyptic world caused by a world war.

Rating: 7.87 (934 votes)

Release Date: 1922-02-16

Overview: The mysterious Count Orlok summons Thomas Hutter to his remote Transylvanian castle in the mountains. The eerie Orlok seeks to buy a house near Hutter and his wife, Ellen. After Orlok reveals his vampire nature, Hutter struggles to escape the castle, knowing that Ellen is in grave danger. Meanwhile Orlok's servant, Knock, prepares for his master to arrive at his new home.

Rating: 7.7 (2283 votes)

Release Date: 2019-11-15

Overview: A mob's punishment of a lone man proves cruel and unusual.

Rating: 6.7 (96 votes)

Release Date: 1971-07-01

Overview: Under the pretense of having a picnic, a geologist takes his teenage daughter and 6-year-old son into the Australian outback and attempts to shoot them. When he fails, he turns the gun on himself, and the two city-bred children must contend with harsh wilderness alone. They are saved by a chance encounter with an Aboriginal boy who shows them how to survive, and in the process underscores the disharmony between nature and modern life.

Rating: 7.3 (415 votes)

Release Date: 1910-03-18

Overview: Frankenstein, a young medical student, trying to create the perfect human being, instead creates a misshapen monster. Made ill by what he has done, Frankenstein is comforted by his fiancée; but on his wedding night he is visited by the monster.

Rating: 6.024 (212 votes)

Release Date: 1922-06-11

Overview: This pioneering documentary film depicts the lives of the indigenous Inuit people of Canada's northern Quebec region. Although the production contains some fictional elements, it vividly shows how its resourceful subjects survive in such a harsh climate, revealing how they construct their igloo homes and find food by hunting and fishing. The film also captures the beautiful, if unforgiving, frozen landscape of the Great White North, far removed from conventional civilization.

Rating: 7.089 (311 votes)

Release Date: 1930-11-28

Overview: The film consists of a series of tightly interlinked vignettes, the most sustained of which details the story of a man and a woman who are passionately in love. Their attempts to consummate their passion are constantly thwarted, by their families, by the Church and bourgeois society in general.

Rating: 6.771 (316 votes)

Release Date: 1896-12-24

Overview: In a medieval castle, a dark magician thought to be Mephistopheles conjures up a series of bizarre creatures and events in order to torment a pair of interloping cavaliers.

Rating: 6.4 (196 votes)