IFC.com (the web site of the Inde­pen­dent Film Chan­nel) has worked up a list of the all-time best movie trail­ers — or, as they put it, the films that pro­mote the actu­al films. The list cuts across dif­fer­ent eras and fea­tures many old­er clas­sics (Psy­cho, Cit­i­zen Kane, Dr. Strangelove, etc.) as well as more recent films. Above, we’ve includ­ed their num­ber one pick, Rid­ley Scot­t’s Alien. And below, we’ve added IFC’s descrip­tion, which sets the stage for view­ing the trail­er:

Mas­ter­ful­ly cut and art­ful to boot, the first glimpse of Rid­ley Scot­t’s 1979 sci-hor­ror clas­sic fea­tures not a sin­gle word of dia­logue and begins in abstract: a ride through a star field, a hov­er above some sort of moon rock, blocky shapes that slow­ly mate­ri­al­ize into the let­ters of the title, crag­gy land­scape tra­versed with a macro lens before pulling back to clar­i­fy what lies on that cratered sur­face — the egg of an alien life form. It cracks open, releas­ing an ill-omened white light and the high-pitched alarm (an ani­mal­is­tic squeal?) that unnerves through­out the rest of the trail­er.

On Fri­day, we brought you Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s mul­ti­me­dia pre­sen­ta­tion at the TED con­fer­ence. Now we bring you his new film, Home, which you can watch until the end of the day on YouTube. The com­plete film in Eng­lish is above. When you’re done, you won’t look at our plan­et in the same way. (You can also find online ver­sions in French, Ger­man and Span­ish.)

From Berlin, two ini­tia­tives from the Deutsche Kinemathek/Museum for Film and Tele­vi­sion.

The first is a col­lec­tion of pri­vate pho­tos and home movies of the Berlin Wall, its even­tu­al col­lapse, and the reuni­fi­ca­tion that fol­lowed. It’s a time­ly col­lec­tion, espe­cial­ly giv­en that the 20th anniver­sary of the Wal­l’s fall is com­ing in Novem­ber. Not only do the images and films encour­age the view­er to reflect on free­dom, but the items found in the col­lec­tion are open to tag­ging, most car­ry Cre­ative Com­mons licens­es, and the online exhib­it is built on inno­v­a­tive open source soft­ware from Col­lec­tive Access. Some of the most pop­u­lar images in the col­lec­tion can be found here.

The sec­ond is a new por­tal that the Kine­math­ek has built with Aus­tri­an, Czech, and French part­ners list­ing infor­ma­tion about more than 3,500 films–including clas­sics from Char­lie Chap­lin and Frank Capra–that were pre­sumed to be lost for­ev­er. The Ger­mans have seed­ed the list with infor­ma­tion about the 37 most sought-after Ger­man films, fea­tur­ing sev­er­al from Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, and F.W. Mur­nau. All that’s miss­ing is a poster with a pic­ture: “Have you seen this film?”

Peter B. Kauf­man comes to us from Intel­li­gent Tele­vi­sion.