A film, also called as a movie or motion picture, is a series of still images which, when shown on a screen, creates the illusion of moving images due to phi phenomenon. A film is created by photographing actual scenes with a motion picture camera; by photographing drawings or miniature models using traditionalanimation techniques; by means of CGI and computer animation; or by a combination of some or all of these techniques and other visual effects. The process of filmmaking is both an art and an industry. Films were originally recorded onto plastic film which was shown through a movie projector onto a large screen; more modern techniques may use wholly digital filming and storage, such as the Red One camera which records onto hard-disk or flash cards.
Films usually include an optical soundtrack, which is a graphic recording of the spoken words, music and other sounds that are to accompany the images.Films are cultural artifacts created by specific cultures. They reflect those cultures, and, in turn, affect them. Film is considered to be an important art form, a source of popular entertainment, and a powerful medium for educating—or indoctrinating—citizens. The visual basis of film gives it a universal power of communication.
The name "movie" originates from the fact that photographic film (also called film stock) has historically been the medium for recording and displaying motion pictures. Many other terms exist for an individual motion picture, including picture, picture show, moving picture, photoplay and flick. The most common term in the United States is movie, while in Europe film is preferred.
About the history of film:
In the mid-19th century, inventions such as the phenakistoscope and zoetrope demonstrated that a carefully designed sequence of drawings, showing phases of the changing appearance of objects in motion, would appear to show the objects actually moving if they were displayed one after the other at a sufficiently rapid rate. These devices relied on the phenomenon of persistence of vision to make the display appear continuous even though the observer's view was actually blocked as each drawing rotated into the location where its predecessor had just been glimpsed. Each sequence was limited to a small number of drawings, usually twelve, so it could only show endlessly repeating cyclical motions. By the late 1880s, the last major device of this type, the praxinoscope, had been elaborated into a form that employed a long coiled band containing hundreds of images painted on glass and used the elements of a magic lantern to project them onto a screen.

The use of sequences of photographs in such devices was initially limited to a few experiments with subjects photographed in a series of poses, because the available emulsions were not sensitive enough to allow the short exposures needed to photograph subjects that were actually moving. The sensitivity was gradually improved and in the late 1870s Eadweard Muybridge created the first animated image sequences photographed in real-time. A row of cameras was used, each in turn capturing one image on a glass photographic plate, so the total number of images in each sequence was limited by the number of cameras, about two dozen at most. Muybridge used his system to analyze the movements of a wide variety of animal and human subjects. Hand-painted images based on the photographs were projected as moving images by means of his zoopraxiscope.

examples of movies:
Despicable me 2
Despicable Me is a 2010 American computer-animated 3D comedy film from Universal Pictures and Illumination Entertainment that was released on July 9, 2010 in the United States. It is Illumination Entertainment's first film. It was directed by Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud, based on an original story by Sergio Pablos.
Preview of Despicable me:

The Smurfs 2
The Smurfs 2 is a 2013 American 3D family comedy film and a sequel to the 2011 film The Smurfs. It is loosely based on The Smurfs comic-book series created by the Belgian comics artist Peyo. It is the second installment of a projected trilogy, produced by Sony Pictures Animation and distributed byColumbia Pictures. The film is directed by Raja Gosnell, who helmed the first, with all the main cast returning. New cast members include Christina Ricci and J. B. Smoove as members of the Naughties, andBrendan Gleeson as Patrick Winslow's stepfather. The film was released on July 31, 2013. The third film is scheduled to be released on July 24, 2015. The film is dedicated to Jonathan Winters, who voiced Papa Smurf and died on April 11, 2013.