Short film

Any motion picture that is short enough in running time not to be considered a feature film.

- Short film

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Serial film

Animated GIF of Prof. Stampfer's Stroboscopische Scheibe No. X (Trentsensky & Vieweg 1833)

A serial film, film serial (or just serial), movie serial, or chapter play, is a motion picture form popular during the first half of the 20th century, consisting of a series of short subjects exhibited in consecutive order at one theater, generally advancing weekly, until the series is completed.

Our Gang

Left to right: Ernie "Sunshine Sammy" Morrison, Andy Samuel, Allen "Farina" Hoskins, Mickey Daniels and Joe Cobb in a 1923 still from one of the earliest Our Gang comedies

Jackie Cooper in the 1930 short School's Out

The gang races rich-kid Jerry Tucker in their makeshift fire engine in the 1934 short Hi'-Neighbor!

George McFarland, Darla Hood, and Carl Switzer in the "Club Spanky" dream sequence from the 1937 short Our Gang Follies of 1938.

Painted cover to Four Color Comics number 674, featuring "The Little Rascals" (Dell, January 1956). Artist: David Gantz.

Our Gang (also known as The Little Rascals or Hal Roach's Rascals) is an American series of comedy short films chronicling a group of poor neighborhood children and their adventures.

Feature film

Narrative film with a running time long enough to be considered the principal or sole presentation in a commercial entertainment program.

Actor playing the Australian bushranger Ned Kelly in The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906), the world's first dramatic feature-length film.

A poster for The Jazz Singer (1927) the first feature film to use recorded sound.

The term feature film originally referred to the main, full-length film in a cinema program that also included a short film and often a newsreel.

Animation

Method in which figures are manipulated to appear as moving images.

Nr. 10 in the reworked second series of Stampfer's stroboscopic discs published by Trentsensky & Vieweg in 1833.

A projecting praxinoscope, from 1882, here shown superimposing an animated figure on a separately projected background scene

Italian-Argentine cartoonist Quirino Cristiani showing the cut and articulated figure of his satirical character El Peludo (based on President Yrigoyen) patented in 1916 for the realization of his films, including the world's first animated feature film El Apóstol.

An example of traditional animation, a horse animated by rotoscoping from Eadweard Muybridge's 19th-century photos.

A clay animation scene from a Finnish television commercial

A 2D animation of two circles joined by a chain

World of Color hydrotechnics at Disney California Adventure creates the illusion of motion using 1,200 fountains with high-definition projections on mist screens.

An animated cartoon is an animated film, usually a short film, featuring an exaggerated visual style.

The Three Stooges

A thinner Curly (with a full head of hair and false handlebar mustache) as the cook in Malice in the Palace (1949) with Larry, Moe and Shemp. Curly's scene was deleted from the final release.

Moe and Larry with Shemp (center) from Malice in the Palace (1949)

Larry, Moe and Curly Joe: the Stooges with Curly Joe DeRita (left) in 1959

Larry, Moe and Curly Joe in a 1962 TV ad promoting their earlier short subjects, though DeRita never appeared in any

Lobby card for full-length film Swing Parade of 1946 with Gale Storm and Phil Regan

Larry and Curly Joe put Moe through his paces on the cover of The Three Stooges (Dell Comics, May 1961).

The Three Stooges were an American vaudeville and comedy team active from 1922 until 1970, best remembered for their 190 short subject films by Columbia Pictures.

Double feature

Motion picture industry phenomenon in which theatres would exhibit two films for the price of one, supplanting an earlier format in which one feature film and various short subject reels would be shown.

The Astor Theatre in Melbourne, Australia has shown double features since its opening in 1936.

An animated cartoon short subject

Hal Roach

American film and television producer, director, and screenwriter, who was the founder of the namesake Hal Roach Studios.

The Hal Roach Studios (1919–1963) in 1959

Upon coming into an inheritance, he began producing short film comedies in 1915 with his friend Harold Lloyd, who portrayed a character known as Lonesome Luke.

Tom and Jerry

Frame from the short The Truce Hurts. The characters in this shot have turned into black stereotypes after a passing car splashed mud on their faces. Scenes such as this are frequently highly edited or cut from modern broadcasts of Tom and Jerry.

Mammy Two Shoes in a scene from the Tom and Jerry short Saturday Evening Puss, in which her full face was shown for the first time.

Tom and Jerry is an American animated media franchise and series of comedy short films created in 1940 by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera.

B movie

Low-budget commercial motion picture.

The "King of the Bs", Roger Corman, produced and directed The Raven (1963) for American International Pictures. Vincent Price headlines a cast of veteran character actors along with a young Jack Nicholson.

Columbia's That Certain Thing (1928) was made for less than $20,000 (about $297,791 today). Soon, director Frank Capra's association with Columbia helped vault the studio toward Hollywood's major leagues.

Stony Brooke (Wayne), Tucson Smith (Corrigan), and Lullaby Joslin (Terhune) did not get much time in harness. Republic Pictures' Pals of the Saddle (1938) lasts just 55 minutes, average for a Three Mesquiteers adventure.

Often marketed as pure sensationalism, many films noir also possessed great visual beauty. Raw Deal (1948), writes scholar Robert Smith, is "resplendent with velvety blacks, mists, netting, and other expressive accessories of poetic noir decor and lighting". Directed by Anthony Mann and shot by John Alton, it was released by Poverty Row's Eagle-Lion firm.

Rocketship X-M (1950), produced and released by small Lippert Pictures, is cited as possibly "the first postnuclear holocaust film". It was at the leading edge of a large cycle of movies, mostly low-budget and many long forgotten, classifiable as "atomic bomb cinema".

Motorpsycho (1965) was not hard to market. It had director Russ Meyer's reputation for eroticism; the biker theme ("MURDERcycles") that soon proved its popularity in historic fashion; and that trendy title word—psycho.

Piranha (1978), directed by Joe Dante and written by John Sayles for Corman's New World Pictures, is an action-filled creature feature, an environmentalist cautionary tale, and a humorous parody of Jaws. It was one of many exploitation films to mimic the design of Jaws [[:File:JAWS Movie poster.jpg|famous poster]], "with its promise of titillating thrills".

"Too gory to be an art film, too arty to be an exploitation film, funny but not quite a comedy": 168 private investors backed the Sundance winner Blood Simple's $1.5 million budget. Brothers Joel and Ethan Coen brought a striking visual style to the 1984 noir. In one repeated motif, writes David Denby, "automobile headlights threaten people doing surreptitious things in the dark."

Not all B movies are necessarily "schlock" or of shock value. Shane Carruth made the sophisticated Sundance-winning science fiction film Primer (2004) for $7,000. According to critic Adam Lemke, Carruth's "cramped, claustrophobic mise-en-scene" exemplifies a "subtle yet austere visual style that never succumbs to the restrictions of his limited budget".

Ed Wood's ultra-low-budget Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959) is often called "the worst film ever made"

With the widespread arrival of sound film in American theaters in 1929, many independent exhibitors began dropping the then-dominant presentation model, which involved live acts and a broad variety of shorts before a single featured film.

Featurette

The Hollywood Sign in the Hollywood Hills, often regarded as the symbol of the American film industry

In the American film industry, a featurette is a kind of film that is shorter than a full-length feature, but longer than a short film.