Warner Bros. Lets You Watch 31 Films Free Online: David Byrne’s True Stories, Christopher Guest’s Waiting for Guffman, Michel Gondry’s The Science of Sleep & More

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It’s Fri­day, which means that tonight, many of us will sit down to watch a movie with our fam­i­ly, our friends, our sig­nif­i­cant oth­er, or — for some cinephiles, best of all — by our­selves. If you haven’t yet lined up any home-cin­e­mat­ic expe­ri­ence in par­tic­u­lar, con­sid­er tak­ing a look at this playlist of 31 fea­ture films just made avail­able to stream by Warn­er Bros. You’ll know the name of that august Hol­ly­wood stu­dio, of course, but did you know that it put out True Sto­ries, the musi­cal plunge into tabloid Amer­i­ca direct­ed by Talk­ing Heads’ David Byrne? Or Wait­ing for Guff­man, the first impro­vised movie by Christo­pher Guest and his troupe of crack comedic play­ers like Eugene Levy, Fred Willard, Cather­ine O’Hara, and Park­er Posey?

httpv://youtu.be/jAyg_ENvHzc

That may already strike many Open Cul­ture read­ers as the mak­ings of a fine dou­ble fea­ture, though some may pre­fer to watch the ear­ly work of anoth­er kind of auteur: Michel Gondry’s The Sci­ence of Sleep, say, or Richard Lin­klater’s Sub­Ur­bia (a stage-play adap­ta­tion that could well be paired with Sid­ney […]

See Vivaldi’s Four Seasons Visualized in Colorfully Animated Scores

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Music is often described as the most abstract of all the arts, and arguably the least visu­al as well. But these qual­i­ties, which seem so basic to the nature of the form, have been chal­lenged for at least three cen­turies, not least by com­posers them­selves. Take Anto­nio Vival­di, whose Le quat­tro sta­gioni, or The…

Behold Harry Clarke’s Hallucinatory Illustrations for Edgar Allan Poe’s Story Collection, Tales of Mystery and Imagination (1923)

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As you’ve prob­a­bly noticed if you’re a reg­u­lar read­er of this site, we’re big fans of book illus­tra­tion, par­tic­u­lar­ly that from the form’s gold­en age—the late 18th and 19th century—before pho­tog­ra­phy took over as the dom­i­nant visu­al medi­um. But while pho­tographs large­ly sup­plant­ed illus­tra­tions in text­books, mag­a­zines, and news­pa­pers over the course of the…

How Japanese Masters Turn Sand Into Swords: The Art of Traditional Sword Making from Start to Finish

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We made sand think: this phrase is used from time to time to evoke the par­tic­u­lar tech­no­log­i­cal won­ders of our age, espe­cial­ly since arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence seems to be back on the slate of pos­si­bil­i­ties. While there would be no Sil­i­con Val­ley with­out sil­i­ca sand, semi­con­duc­tors are hard­ly the first mar­vel human­i­ty has forged out…

When Charlie Chaplin Entered a Chaplin Look-Alike Contest & Came in 20th Place

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Char­lie Chap­lin start­ed appear­ing in his first films in 1914—40 films, to be precise—and, by 1915, the Unit­ed States had a major case of “Chap­lini­tis.” Chap­lin mus­tach­es were sud­den­ly pop­ping up every­where–as were Chap­lin imi­ta­tors and Chap­lin look-alike con­tests. A young Bob Hope appar­ent­ly won one such con­test in Cleve­land. Chap­lin Fever con­tin­ued burn­ing hot…