I was recently watching some YouTube videos on Crash Course about film history with my three year old daughter.
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The Phantom Carriage (1921)
Tag: 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die
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Orphans of the Storm (1921)
The French Revolution turns out to be a very good match for DW Griffith.
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Way Down East (1920)
This is the fourth DW Griffith film I’ve watched in my tour through film history, and the fourth starring Lillian Gish.
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Within Our Gates (1920)
For the first hour or so of its 75 minutes, Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates is far more compelling as a historical artifact than as cinema.
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Broken Blossoms (1919)
DW Griffith, the premier American epic filmmaker of the 1910s, had his biggest financial stumble in the hugely ambitious, 3.5-hour Intolerance.
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The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)
In the the late 1910s-1920s, a bunch of German filmmakers invented the tone and aesthetics of horror movies amidst postwar defeat drudgery in a movement called “German expressionism.”
The problem with choosing “intolerance” as a theme for your time-sprawling opus is that it is so shapeless and blunt as to lose all meaning.
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The Vampires (Les Vampires) (1915)
The film serial was an early cinema format that is, honestly, more familiar today than ever, though through a different mechanism:
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The Birth of a Nation (1915)
I don’t even know where to begin. Imagine me staring speechless at a blank text box for several minutes as the prelude to this review.
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The Great Train Robbery (1903)
As usual, the Americans got there after the Europeans, but did it with more scope and spectacle.