Even after Brighton & Hove ceased to be a significant centre for film production towards the end of the Edwardian era, the city (as it now is) played host to numerous productions. Apart from being a convenient and familiar seaside site within easy reach of London, it had a widespread reputation for its Regency connections, its leisure and illicit sex and even for its crime, including gruesome murders.
        Its reputation extended even to Hollywood. Who would have believed that the musical that gave the world Night and Day and The Continental was partly set in Brighton? 
        This listing is divided into three: the silent films that happened to be made in Brighton & Hove because that is where the film-makers lived, and the sound films that chose to use Brighton as a setting in its own right. A third page includes short films and television productions, plus there is a list of films where the setting is Brighton but the shooting was done entirely elsewhere, except for the use of stock shots to establish the scene.
        And Brighton is distinctively Brighton. Whilst Leeds or Liverpool can be made to stand in for Moscow or New York, the usual locations in Brighton are usually too visually familiar to be anywhere else. (But see Left for Dead.)
        An interesting recent development is a sudden spate of low-budget films, both feature-length and shorts, made by directors, producers and cast with links to Brighton. The advent and acceptability of digital video has fuelled this spurt and may even lead to the development of a sustainable local production industry for the first time since the Edwardian era.

Listing for the silent era
Listing for the talkie era
Listing of short films and others
Listing of films set in but not shot in Brighton

Sources

John Barnes: The Beginnings of the Cinema in England 1896-1901, five volumes (University of Exeter Press).
Maire McQueeney: The Brighton Rock Picture Book (Dining Table Publications, 1999).
Kiss & Kill: Film Visions of Brighton (Royal Pavilion, Museum & Art Gallery, 2002)—an indispensible source.
South East Film and Video Archive.
A website called www.busstation.net has information about the buses that appear in some of these films