City Lights

#34 at the time of writing.

A tramp falls in love with a blind flower girl, and woos her with the help of an unreliable millionaire friend.

My reaction to this (American) film was pretty much the polar opposite of my reaction to Metropolis, a contemporary German film that I watched last year. Metropolis felt messy, overacted, unsubtle - but awesome, epic, stylish. City Lights is neat, gentle, sweet - but... well... just a little bit dull.

The movie calls itself out as a pantomime, and it certainly excels at that, with Charlie Chaplin's wonderful comic timing, choreography and pathos carrying the story along. I watched it with my nearly three-year-old daughter and she loved it.

Anyway, I am clearly in the minority with my under-enthusiasm. Orson Welles said this was his favourite movie; Albert Einstein attended the American premiere and George Bernard Shaw the British one. The American Film Institute ranks it as the 11th best film of all time.

This was Charlie Chaplin's first film made during the sound era. He faced extreme pressure to make the film as a talkie, but such was his popularity and power in Hollywood that he was able to complete and release the film as a silent (albeit with recorded music) at a time when the rest of the American motion picture industry had converted to sound.

Charlie Chaplin, ever the stickler, allegedly re-shot the scene in which his character the Little Tramp buys a flower from the blind flower-girl 342 times, as he could not find a satisfactory way of showing that the blind flower-girl thought the mute tramp was wealthy.

Wall·E

#39 at time of writing.

The teasers for Wall·E had me salivating for more since Ratatouille graced our screens. With that much anticipation, it’s almost impossible not to be let down. But the truth is even more unlikely: My colossal expectations were not only met, but exceeded – with room to spare.

This fairytale of a robot who falls in love boasts a host of superlatives. It's the highest rated animated feature on IMDb. It's the most expensive animation ever made (it cost more than Waterworld). And it's the probably the movie with the least dialogue to ever be nominated for an Oscar for best original screenplay.

Director Andrew Stanton and the Pixar team watched one Charlie Chaplin and one Buster Keaton film every day for almost a year, to give them confidence in how a full range of emotions could be portrayed silently.

All that research paid off in spades. Sumptuous animation, endearing characters, the most romantic robots you've ever seen - this tongue-in-cheek cautionary tale is an instant classic.

Surely it can’t be THAT wonderful, I hear you say. Well, it's a bit preachy, linear, and has a couple of cheesy lines. But everyone knows there are only two kinds of Pixar films: great ones and perfect ones – and Wall·E is Pixar on top form.

Films for Free at a Monitor Near You

There are 1000 megabytes in a gigabyte. There are 1000 gigabytes in a terabyte. And there are 1000 terabytes in a petabyte. The Internet Archive has been archiving the entire Internet since 1996, and now contains nearly two petabytes of information – more than even the world’s largest library.

Among that ocean of information is a huge archive of copyright-free and copyright-expired movies. Last week, I browsed the Moving Image Archive and treated myself to a string of films from the dawn of cinema.

I started with Le voyage dans la lune, a short film created in 1902 by Georges Méliès. Méliès created a number of special effects that are still used today, and is credited as the first person to use celluloid to tell self-contained stories.

With my appetite whetted, I spent the next few hours downloading and absorbing Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Fritz Lang, The Man With a Movie Camera, Battleship Potemkin, Nosferatu – and a few Merrie Melodies along the way.

These golden oldies are a pleasure to experience on two levels. First, because they are oddly familiar. The styles and stories, the idioms and issues that characterize the range of cinematic possibility as we perceive it today, were nearly all present from the very beginning. And secondly, never mind the historical interest, they are just wonderful films on their own terms – a great joy to watch.