The Best of… 1925

From the distance of a full century, we look back at the high watermark films of the year that saw the publication of both The Great Gatsby and Mein Kampf—a year still marked by the Great War (depicted, with horror and awe, in King Vidor’s The Big Parade) and unknowingly heading for the next one, and a year in which fortunes were made overnight on Wall Street and the silent cinema was nearing its artistic apotheosis, with directors around the world, including Sergei Eisenstein, Charlie Chaplin, and Ernst Lubitsch, establishing cinema’s claim to being the popular creative medium of the century beyond any reasonable doubt. From the deadpan genius of Buster Keaton to the Lubitsch touch as applied to Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan, The Best of… 1925 is a whirlwind tour of an annus mirabilis in the lifetime of the Seventh Art.