Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) is F. W. Murnau's silent melodrama, free to watch online on iFILM. A young farmer falls hard for a woman visiting from the city. She wants him to drown his wife and sell the farm.

He rows his wife out onto the lake to do it — and can't go through with it. What follows is a single day in the big city, where husband and wife fall for each other all over again: a streetcar ride, a photographer's studio, a carnival, a dance floor. Murnau tells almost all of it through camera moves and light, barely using title cards. The characters have no names. They're simply the Man, the Wife, and the Woman from the City.

At the very first Academy Awards, the film picked up three statuettes, among them the prize for Best Unique and Artistic Picture and the acting award for Janet Gaynor. Murnau brought the visual grammar of German Expressionism to the Fox lot and made what plenty of critics still rank as the high point of silent cinema. If you assume movies without dialogue must be a chore, start here. Stream Sunrise (1927) online on iFILM.