Lillian Gish

It's August. Like they have most summers, elderly widowed sisters Libby Strong and Sarah Webber, who live in Philadelphia, are staying together in the family's summer cottage on an island off the coast of Maine. There are a few people who have been half-century friends or acquaintances on the island, including Tisha Doughty and Joshua Brackett.

Nearly 100 years after its initial release, this film remains one of the most controversial films ever made and a landmark achievement in film history that continues to fascinate and enrage audiences. It is the epic story of two families, one northern and one southern, during and after the Civil War. D.W. Griffith's masterful direction combines brilliant battle scenes and tender romance with a vicious portrayal of African-Americans.

A poor country girl is tricked into a fake marriage and has an illegitimate child who dies. After starting a new life, her past is exposed and she is evicted into a blizzard.

A self-styled preacher marries and murders the widow of an executed convict with whom he once shared a cell. He then terrorizes her two young children to force them to tell him the whereabouts of the $10,000 he knows their father hid before his imprisonment. "The Night of the Hunter -- incredibly, the only film the great actor Charles Laughton ever directed -- is truly a stand-alone masterwork. A horror movie with qualities of a Grimm fairy tale,...