Top 100 of the '20s

In a futuristic city sharply divided between the working class and the city planners, the son of the city's mastermind falls in love with a working-class prophet who predicts the coming of a savior to mediate their differences.

In the midst of the Russian Revolution of 1905, the crew of the battleship Potemkin mutiny against the brutal, tyrannical regime of the vessel's officers. The resulting street demonstration in Odessa brings on a police massacre.

The demon Mephisto wagers with God that he can corrupt a mortal man's soul.

Arch-criminal Dr. Mabuse sets out to make a fortune and run Berlin. Detective Wenk sets out to stop him.

A married farmer falls under the spell of a sophisticated woman from the city, who tries to convince him to drown his wife.

The business tycoon Nicolas Saccard is nearly ruined by his rival Gunderman, when he tries to raise capital for his company. To push up the price of his stock, Saccard plans a publicity stunt involving the aviator Jacques Hamelin flying across the Atlantic to Guyana and drilling for oil there, much to the dismay of Hamelin's wife Line. While Hamelin is away, Saccard tries to seduce Line. Line finally realizes that she and her husband were pawns in Saccard's scheme, and she accuses him of stock fraud.

In the beginning of the industrial revolution, the Paris Commune was established in 1871 against the rich and the powerful, and violently repressed by the army that remained faithful to a tamer form of Republicanism. How could the love story between a young sales girl and a soldier unable to decide if he was pro or against the radical fashion? Two short months were needed for the answer to be found - in blood and tears, and under rain that washes all past memories. Any day, a New Babylon shop will open with frilly things for the bourgeois girls. The washerwomen will be there to wash them.

On an island off the coast of Brittany four isolated men collect seaweed. Two young best friends have a quarrel and when one's thumb becomes infected his friend must risk his life on the ocean to bring him to the doctor.

A Cashier in a bank in a small German town is alerted to the power of money by the visit of a rich Italian lady. He embezzles 60, 000 Marks and leaves for the capital city, where he attempts to find satisfaction in politics, sport, love and religion.

A soldier returns to Kyiv after surviving a train crash and encounters clashes between nationalists and collectivists.

The rise and inevitable fall of an amoral but naive young woman whose insouciant eroticism inspires lust and violence in those around her.

Princess Kriemhild vows to avenge her husband's murder but must overcome her brothers who swore allegiance to Hagen. She marries Etzel, King of the Huns, and persuades his army to attack Hagen, but she loses more than she bargained for.

A former Imperial Russian general and cousin of the Czar ends up in Hollywood as an extra in a movie directed by a former revolutionary.

A con artist masquerades as Russian nobility and attempts to seduce the wife of an American diplomat.

A five-person team of gold prospectors in the Yukon has just begun to enjoy great success when one of the members snaps, and suddenly kills two of the others. The two survivors, a husband and wife, subdue the killer but are then faced with an agonizing dilemma. With no chance of turning him over to the authorities for many weeks, they must decide whether to exact justice themselves or to risk trying to keep him restrained until they can return to civilization.

Salome, the daughter of Herodias, seduces her step-father/uncle Herod, governor of Judea, with a salacious dance. In return, he promises her the head of the prophet John the Baptist.

The protagonist, a lazy pen-pusher, gets the sack for his bureaucratic idleness, and learns that the way back into the job market depends on getting a letter of recommendation from a "grandmother".

A newly elected village parson is required to marry the previous parson's widow. However he's already married, and the woman is old enough to be his grandmother.

Ludivine Bucaille stupidly wishes that Leherg and his son Delphin both die at sea. Amazingly, Leherg actually is lost at sea but his son somehow survives. His mother subsequently dies of sorrow. Remorseful, Ludivine gets her parents to take Delphin in their care. She makes sure the house is nice and tidy. Delphin and Ludivine grow to love each other and eventually get engaged. But father Bucaille, a drunk, wants Ludivine to marry Lauderin, the owner of a bar. Ludivine, in a moment of jealousy, thinking that Delphin has cheated on her, accepts. As Delpin plans on leaving the country the day after the engagement, Ludivine takes a boat to meet him. Lauderin sneaks into the boat and, as a storm hits it, he attempts to rape her. Delphin comes to the rescue. The two lovers can now unite.

A man travels around a city with a camera slung over his shoulder, documenting urban life with dazzling invention.

A story that is built up with filmed documents in an experimental fashion.

A recalcitrant thief vies with a duplicitous Mongol ruler for the hand of a beautiful princess.

Danish silent movie-star Asta Nielsen formed her own production company to make this film, in which new elements are combined with features (and a few lines) familiar from Shakespeare's version of the legend. The most important of these changes sees Hamlet made into a female character - a princess forced to masquerade as a man by her scheming mother; from this follows Hamlet's secret passion for Horatio and rivalry with Ophelia for his love. Queen Gertrude is here presented as conspiring in her first husband's murder, and the old king's ghost does not appear - young Hamlet merely hears a voice from the tomb and (apparently) dreams of him. In addition, Hamlet now kills Claudius (in a fire) immediately upon returning from Norway with an army led by old school- friend Fortinbras, and it falls to Gertrude to engineer Hamlet's death in the fencing match as well as kill herself by accidentally drinking the poisoned wine.

In Spring is a masterpiece of Ukrainian cinema avant-garde, a non-fiction film made by Mikhail Kaufman, Dziga Vertov's brother and co-author, along the lines of the avant-gardist theory of «cine-eye». The film shows Kyiv in 1929, almost unknown today. Pictures of wakening city, its resurging life resonate with lyrical views of reviving nature. Kaufman's attentive camera dwells deliberately on smiling faces of children, lyrically depicting a declaration of love to Kyiv. In In Spring, Kaufman used the method of «hidden camera» for the first time.

Two men, lost in the desert, meet Queen Antinea, ruler of Atlantis.