If you wish to become a cinephile wor­thy of the title, you must first pledge nev­er to refuse to watch a film for any of the fol­low­ing rea­sons. First, that it is in a dif­fer­ent lan­guage and sub­ti­tled; sec­ond, that it is too old; third, that it is too slow; fourth, that it is too long; and fifth, that it has no “sto­ry.” These cat­e­gories of refusal are what Lewis Bond, co-cre­ator of the YouTube chan­nel The House of Tab­u­la, calls “the five car­di­nal sins of cin­e­ma,” and no one who com­mits them can ever attain an under­stand­ing of the art form, its nature, its his­to­ry, and its poten­tial. Once you’ve made your vow, you’ll be ready to watch through the 135 chrono­log­i­cal­ly ordered motion pic­tures that con­sti­tute The House of Tab­u­la’s “Ulti­mate Film Stud­ies Watch­list,” ful­ly explained in the video above.

While the movies first emerged in the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry, and plen­ty con­tin­ue to be made here in the twen­ty-first, they stand unop­posed as the defin­ing pop­u­lar art form of the twen­ti­eth. And it is from the span of that cen­tu­ry that all the films on this list are drawn, from Georges Méliès’ Le Voy­age dans la Lune and D. W. Grif­fith’s The Birth of a Nation to all the way to Quentin Taran­ti­no’s Pulp Fic­tion and the Wachowskis’ The Matrix.

What hap­pened to cin­e­ma between those peri­ods was, in a sense, a process of tech­no­log­i­cal and artis­tic evo­lu­tion, but as Bond’s com­men­tary under­scores, old­er films aren’t super­seded by new­er ones — or at least, old­er films of val­ue aren’t. Indeed, the ambi­tion and cre­ativ­i­ty of these decades, or even cen­tu­ry-old movies, puts many a cur­rent release to shame.

By no means is the list dom­i­nat­ed by obscu­ri­ties. Gone with the Wind, Fan­ta­sia, Sin­gin’ in the Rain, Psy­cho, Jaws, Alien: even the least cin­e­mat­i­cal­ly inclined among us have seen a few of these movies, or at least they feel like they have. Maybe they’ve nev­er got around to watch­ing Cit­i­zen Kane, but they’ll have a sense that it belongs on any syl­labus meant to cul­ti­vate an under­stand­ing of film as an art form. The pres­ence of Star Wars may come as more of a sur­prise, but no less than Cit­i­zen Kane, it illus­trates the ben­e­fit of watch­ing your way through cin­e­ma his­to­ry: if you do, you’ll expe­ri­ence just how much of a break they rep­re­sent­ed with all that came before. Ordi­nary movie­go­ers may feel like they’ve seen it all before, but cinephiles — espe­cial­ly those who’ve made the jour­ney through The House of Tab­u­la’s watch­list — know how vast an area of cin­e­mat­ic pos­si­bil­i­ty remains unex­plored.

Relat­ed con­tent:

78 Great Direc­tors Who Shaped the His­to­ry of Cin­e­ma: An Intro­duc­tion

The 30 Great­est Films Ever Made: A Video Essay

Mar­tin Scors­ese Cre­ates a List of 39 Essen­tial For­eign Films for a Young Film­mak­er

The Evo­lu­tion of Cin­e­ma: Watch Near­ly 140 Years of Film His­to­ry Unfold in 80 Min­utes

Take a 16-Week Crash Course on the His­to­ry of Movies: From the First Mov­ing Pic­tures to the Rise of Mul­ti­plex­es & Net­flix

The 15 Great­est Doc­u­men­taries of All Time: Explore Films by Wern­er Her­zog, Errol Mor­ris & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Ever-increas­ing eco­nom­ic inequal­i­ty, rapid tech­no­log­i­cal change, the cre­ation of dom­i­nant cor­po­ra­tions con­trolled by a small busi­ness elite, politi­cians in the pock­et of big busi­ness lead­ers, and the rise of pop­ulism and nativism. These are all fea­tures of Amer­i­can life in 2025. But our nation has also seen this movie play before, most notably back in the Gild­ed Age, which ran from the 1870s through the late 1890s. Above, we have a free two-hour doc­u­men­tary on the Gild­ed Age cre­at­ed by PBS. They write:

In the clos­ing decades of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry, dur­ing what has become known as the Gild­ed Age, the pop­u­la­tion of the Unit­ed States dou­bled in the span of a sin­gle gen­er­a­tion. The nation became the world’s lead­ing pro­duc­er of food, coal, oil, and steel, attract­ed vast amounts of for­eign invest­ment, and pushed into mar­kets in Europe and the Far East. As nation­al wealth expand­ed, two class­es rose simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, sep­a­rat­ed by a gulf of expe­ri­ence and cir­cum­stance that was unprece­dent­ed in Amer­i­can life. These dis­par­i­ties sparked pas­sion­ate and vio­lent debate over ques­tions still being asked in our own times: How is wealth best dis­trib­uted, and by what process? Does gov­ern­ment exist to pro­tect pri­vate prop­er­ty or pro­vide balm to the inevitable casu­al­ties of a churn­ing indus­tri­al sys­tem? Should the gov­ern­ment con­cern itself chiefly with eco­nom­ic growth or eco­nom­ic jus­tice? The bat­tles over these ques­tions were fought in Con­gress, the courts, the polling place, the work­place and the streets. The out­come of these dis­putes was both uncer­tain and momen­tous, and marked by a pas­sion­ate vit­ri­ol and lev­el of vio­lence that would shock the con­science of many Amer­i­cans today. The Gild­ed Age presents a com­pelling and com­plex sto­ry of one of the most con­vul­sive and trans­for­ma­tive eras in Amer­i­can his­to­ry.

To a cer­tain degree, this doc­u­men­tary will help you make bet­ter sense of our own fraught times and per­haps feel more opti­mistic about where we might end up. (It’s worth keep­ing in mind that the dis­rup­tions of the Gild­ed Age even­tu­al­ly gave way to the reforms of the Pro­gres­sive Era.) What’s more, if you’re watch­ing the excel­lent HBO series, The Gild­ed Age, the film pro­vides his­tor­i­cal back­ground that will direct­ly add to your appre­ci­a­tion of the show. You can watch the film online above, or find it in our col­lec­tion of Free Doc­u­men­taries, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

From today’s van­tage, the first decade of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry can look like an even more dis­tant peri­od of his­to­ry than it is. In many cor­ners of urban civ­i­liza­tion, the cabarets, tea­rooms, and oth­er near-par­a­lyt­i­cal­ly man­nered insti­tu­tions of the Belle Époque were very much going con­cerns. To those who lived in that era, it must have been easy enough to believe that the ways of nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry-style aris­toc­ra­cy and empire could per­pet­u­ate them­selves for­ev­er. Yet those were also the years of Georges Méliès Le Voy­age dans la Lune, the Wright broth­ers’ first flight; the pro­lif­er­a­tion of auto­mo­biles and sub­way trains; Rus­si­a’s loss in war to Japan and first rev­o­lu­tion; Ein­stein’s dis­cov­ery of rel­a­tiv­i­ty, the pho­to­elec­tric effect, and Brown­ian motion; and Picas­so’s Les Demoi­selles d’Av­i­gnon.

The world as it was, in oth­er words, was giv­ing way to the world as it would be. Such is the con­text of the doc­u­men­tary footage col­lect­ed — and col­orized, and upscaled — in the video at the top of the post. Begin­ning in a bustling work­ing-class street in Hollinwood, Eng­land, this tour of the nine­teen-hun­dreds con­tin­ues on to places like Spain, India, Chi­na, New York, Japan, Brazil, Den­mark, Aus­tria, and Ger­many.

One aspect of all this footage liable to catch the twen­ty-first-cen­tu­ry eye is all the myr­i­ad forms of trans­porta­tion on dis­play, some run­ning on sole­ly ani­mal or even human mus­cle, and oth­ers pro­pelled by the kind of engines then at the heart of indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tions the world over. (You can even catch a glimpse of Wup­per­tal’s sus­pend­ed Schwe­be­bahn, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture.)

All this gives us a clear­er sense of why so many con­tem­po­rary observers expressed feel­ings of civ­i­liza­tion­al whiplash, espe­cial­ly if, as was becom­ing more and more com­mon, they’d emi­grat­ed from a less tech­no­log­i­cal­ly advanced soci­ety to a more tech­no­log­i­cal­ly advanced one. For those liv­ing at the edge of progress, the shape of things to come (a phrase lat­er used as a book title by one such observ­er, the pro­lif­ic H. G. Wells) was any­one’s guess, and it’s hard­ly sur­pris­ing that so many for­ward-look­ing philoso­phies, ide­olo­gies, and art move­ments would arise from such a fer­ment. Still, it would have tak­en a pre­scient mind indeed to fore­see the ascen­dance of com­mu­nism, Nazism, the Amer­i­can empire, and mass broad­cast media just ahead, to say noth­ing of two world wars. William Gib­son had yet to be born, let alone to utter his now-famous quote, but as we can see, the future was already here in the nine­teen-tens — and uneven­ly dis­trib­uted.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Footage of Cities Around the World in the 1890s: Lon­don, Tokyo, New York, Venice, Moscow & More

Paris Had a Mov­ing Side­walk in 1900, and a Thomas Edi­son Film Cap­tured It in Action

Immac­u­late­ly Restored Film Lets You Revis­it Life in New York City in 1911

Berlin Street Scenes Beau­ti­ful­ly Caught on Film (1900–1914)

Watch Life on the Streets of Tokyo in Footage Record­ed in 1913: Caught Between the Tra­di­tion­al and the Mod­ern

Watch 1920s “City Sym­phonies” Star­ring the Great Cities of the World: From New York to Berlin to São Paulo

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

The Wiz­ard of Oz is now show­ing at Las Vegas’ Sphere. Or a ver­sion of it is, at any rate, and not one that meets with the approval of all the pic­ture’s count­less fans. “The beloved 1939 film star­ring Judy Gar­land, wide­ly con­sid­ered one of the great­est Hol­ly­wood clas­sics, has been stretched and mor­phed and adapt­ed to fit the enor­mous dome-shaped venue,” writes the New York Times’ Alis­sa Wilkin­son. This entailed an exten­sion “upward and out­ward with the help of A.I. as well as visu­al effects artists. The cool tor­na­do cre­at­ed by Arnold Gille­spie for the orig­i­nal has been trad­ed for some­thing dig­i­tal, and even­tu­al­ly you can’t see it at all, because you’re inside the fun­nel. New per­for­mances and vis­tas have also been gen­er­at­ed,” which is “at best ques­tion­able” eth­i­cal­ly, to say noth­ing of the aes­thet­ics.

Yet even giv­en the con­sid­er­able mod­i­fi­ca­tions to — and exci­sions from — the orig­i­nal film, “most audi­ences will glad­ly over­look all of this, wowed by the sheer scale of the spec­ta­cle.” The Wiz­ard of Oz has, as has often been said, the kind of “mag­ic” that endures through even great defi­cien­cies in pre­sen­ta­tion.

That qual­i­ty first became appar­ent in 1956, sev­en­teen years after the movie’s release in cin­e­mas, when it first aired on tele­vi­sion. Though the dra­mat­ic tran­si­tion from black-and-white to col­or would have been lost on most home view­ers at the time, “45 mil­lion peo­ple tuned in, far more than those who had seen it in the­aters,” says the nar­ra­tor of the It Was A Sh*t Show video above. Anoth­er broad­cast, in 1959, did even bet­ter, and there­after The Wiz­ard of Oz became an “annu­al must-see event” on TV, which even­tu­al­ly made it “the most-watched film in his­to­ry.”

That sta­tus jus­ti­fies the movie’s infa­mous­ly trou­bled pro­duc­tion, which is the video’s cen­tral sub­ject. From its numer­ous rewrites all the way through to its fee­ble box office per­for­mance, The Wiz­ard of Oz encoun­tered severe dif­fi­cul­ties every step of the way, which gave rise to rumors that con­tin­ue to haunt it: that an actor died from poi­son make­up, for exam­ple, or that one of the munchkins com­mit­ted sui­cide in view of the cam­era. While the pro­duc­tion caused no fatal­i­ties — at least not direct­ly — it did come close more than once, to say noth­ing of the psy­cho­log­i­cal toll the com­bi­na­tion of high ambi­tion and per­sis­tent dys­func­tion must have tak­en on many, if not most, of its par­tic­i­pants. Even hear­ing enu­mer­at­ed only its clear­ly doc­u­ment­ed prob­lems is enough to make one won­der how the pic­ture was ever com­plet­ed in the first place. Yet now, 86 years lat­er, its Sphere rein­ter­pre­ta­tion is rak­ing in $2 mil­lion in tick­et sales per day: an act of wiz­ardry if ever there was one.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch the Ear­li­est Sur­viv­ing Filmed Ver­sion of The Wiz­ard of Oz (1910)

The Wiz­ard of Oz Bro­ken Apart and Put Back Togeth­er in Alpha­bet­i­cal Order

The Com­plete Wiz­ard of Oz Series, Avail­able as Free eBooks and Free Audio Books

Hear Wait­ing for Godot, the Acclaimed 1956 Pro­duc­tion Star­ring The Wiz­ard of Oz’s Bert Lahr

Watch the Sesame Street Episode Banned for Being Too Scary, Fea­tur­ing The Wiz­ard of Oz’s Wicked Witch of the West (1976)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.