Cops

Nineteen minutes of the most perfectly escalating chaos in silent comedy. Buster Keaton plays a hapless young man who inadvertently gets tangled up in a police parade, acquires a cartload of furniture, and through a series of increasingly absurd misunderstandings becomes the target of the entire Los Angeles police force. What follows is one of cinema's great chase sequences — Keaton alone against hundreds of cops, dodging and weaving through city streets with the serene, unflappable grace that made him unique among comedians. The film's construction is a marvel of comic engineering, each gag building logically on the last, and its climax — involving a bomb, a crowd, and impeccable timing — is one of Keaton's most celebrated moments. Pure kinetic joy.