As Michael Palin once put it, “there’s no getting away from the wit, wonder and wizardry of the man Cahiers du Cinéma once described as Terry Gilliam.”
Those qualities are clearly visible in this very funny early film by Gilliam called The Miracle of Flight.

Hell. We tend to take it for granted. Have you ever stopped to think about the heating bills, or the stupendous overhead?
John Cleese plays a cash-strapped Prince of Darkness in this classic sketch from The Frost Report, the show that launched Cleese as a television star in Britain. He was 26 years old at the time.

If you’re a regular reader of Open Culture, and if you live in the United States, then chances are you listen to Terry Gross’ Fresh Air interviews on NPR, at least occasionally.

Jacques Tati was the gentle poet of French cinema. His comedies, including Mon Oncle and Mr. Hulot’s Holiday, are less about hilarity than what Roger Ebert calls “an amused affection for human nature.

We’ve shown you the heady David Byrne lecturing sometimes on how architecture helped music evolve, and sometimes on the connections between music and cognition. We’ve also given you the breezier David Byrne extolling the virtues of urban bicycling.

Drink our coffee. Or else. That’s the message of these curiously sadistic TV commercials produced by Jim Henson between 1957 and 1961.
Henson made 179 ten-second spots for Wilkins Coffee, a regional company with distribution in the Baltimore-Washington D.C.

A couple of years ago, Maria Popova (aka @BrainPicker) highlighted for us a 2009 talk by John Cleese that offered a handbook for creating the right conditions for creativity. Of course, John Cleese knows something about creativity, being one of the leading forces behind Monty Python, the beloved British comedy group.

One day in early 1962, Mel Brooks was sitting in a New York City theater watching an avant-garde film by the Scottish-born Canadian animator Norman McLaren when he heard someone in the audience expressing bewilderment.

Fewer than 40 minutes survive of My Best Friend’s Birthday, the first film directed by Quentin Tarantino. But its brief screen time runs dense with references to Elvis Presley, the Partridge Family, A Countess from Hong Kong, Rod Stewart, Deputy Dawg, and That Darn Cat.

And now for something completely delicious: a rare gem from the Monty Python vault called Away From it All, featuring John Cleese as Nigel Farquhar-Bennett, a voice-over artist badly in need of a holiday.
The 13-minute film is a parody of the mind-numbing travelogues they used to show in movie theaters.