The Lists: Must See Movies, 1902-1929

Battleship Potempkin. Image courtesy of Reel Media International.

Note: Boldfaced titles with asterisk (*) indicate top 10 of the decade.

A Trip to the Moon (1902, George Melies)
The Great Train Robbery (1903, Edwin S. Porter)
The Birth of a Nation (1915, D.W. Griffith)
Les Vampires (1915, Louis Feuillade)
Intolerance (1916, D.W. Griffith)
Broken Blossoms (1919, D.W. Griffith)
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920, Robert Wiene)
The Phantom Carriage (1920, Victor Sjostrom)
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921, Rex Ingram)
The Kid (1921, Charles Chaplin)
Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler (1922, Fritz Lang)
Foolish Wives (1922, Erich von Stroheim)
Nanook of the North (1922, Robert J. Flaherty)
Nosferatu, A Symphony of Horror (1922, F.W. Murnau)
Orphans of the Storm (1922, D.W. Griffith)
La Roue (1923, Abel Gance)
Our Hospitality (1923, Buster Keaton)
Safety Last (1923, Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor) *
Greed (1924, Erich von Stroheim) *
The Last Laugh (1924, F.W. Murnau)
Sherlock Jr. (1924, Buster Keaton) *
Strike (1924, Sergei Eisenstein)
The Thief of Bagdad (1924, Raoul Walsh)
Battleship Potempkin (1925, Sergei Eisenstein) *
The Big Parade (1925, King Vidor)
The Gold Rush (1925, Charles Chaplin)
The Phantom of the Opera (1925, Rupert Julian)
Seven Chances (1925, Buster Keaton)
Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1926, Fred Niblo)
The General (1926, Buster Keaton)
The Jazz Singer (1927, Alan Crosland Jr.)
The Kid Brother (1927, J.A. Howe and Ted Wilde)
The Man Who Laughs (1927, Paul Leni)
Metropolis (1927, Fritz Lang) *
Napoleon (1927, Abel Gance) *
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927, F.W. Murnau) *
The Unknown (1927, Tod Browning)
The Crowd (1928, King Vidor)
The Docks of New York (1928, Josef von Sternberg)
October (1928, Sergei Eisenstein)
The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928, Carl Theodor Dreyer) *
Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928, Buster Keaton and Charles Reisner)
Un Chien Andalou (1928, Luis Bunuel) *
Blackmail (1929, Alfred Hitchcock)
Haxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages (1929, Benjamin Christensen)
The Man with a Movie Camera (1929, Dziga Vertov)
Pandora's Box (1929, George Wilhelm Pabst) *