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30 Highest Rated Movies of all Time: Movies With 100% on Rotten Tomatoes

For 23 years, Rotten Tomatoes has been the go-to for those looking to get the scoop on what is new in movies. Aggregating opinions from fans and critics across the country, Rotten Tomatoes uses its “Tomatometer” system to calculate critical reception for any given film. If 60% of reviews are positive, the movie is given a “Fresh” status, but if positive reviews fall below that benchmark, it is deemed “Rotten.” A popular piece of media will typically fall between the 70-90% range, but rarely, a project will receive a 100% score. This means every last review from critics was positive.

Close to 480 films with at least 20 reviews have achieved a 100% score, with many coming very close. Greta Gerwig’s “Lady Bird” had a 100% rating with 196 positive reviews before a critic submitted a negative one, knocking it down to 99%. The immortal classic “Citizen Kane” had a 100% rating until a negative review from a 1941 issue of the Chicago Tribune was rediscovered, revoking its 100% status.

Here are Rotten Tomatoes’ highest-rated movies that have managed to maintain a 100% score and have the highest number of reviews.

The Philadelphia Story (1940)

“The Philadelphia Story” is based on the 1939 Broadway play and follows a socialite whose wedding plans are complicated by the arrival of her ex-husband and a tabloid magazine journalist. Directed by George Cukor, he film stars Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, James Stewart and Ruth Hussey.

“It’s definitely not a celluloid adventure for wee lads and lassies and no doubt some of the faithful watchers-out for other people’s souls are going to have a word about that,” Variety ‘s review said. “…All of which, in addition to a generous taste of socialite quaffing to excess and talk of virtue, easy and uneasy, makes “The Philadelphia Story” a picture every suburban mamma and poppa must see – after Junior and little Elsie Dinsmore are tucked away.”

Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)

Christmas musical film “Meet Me in St. Louis” follows a year of the Smith family’s life in St. Louis leading up to the opening of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, known as the St. Louis World’s Fair, in the spring of 1904. The film stars Judy Garland, Margaret O’Brien, Mary Astor, Lucille Bremer, Tom Drake, Leon Ames, Marjorie Main, June Lockhart and Joan Carroll and directed by Vincente Minnelli, who Garland later married.

“‘Meet Me in St. Louis’ is wholesome in story [from the book by Sally Benson], colorful both in background and its literal Technicolor, and as American as the World’s Series,” Variety ‘s review said. “Garland achieves true stature with her deeply understanding performance, while her sisterly running-mate, Lucille Bremer, likewise makes excellent impact with a well-balanced performance.”

Singin’ in the Rain (1952)

The musical romantic comedy “Singin’ In the Rain” follows three Hollywood stars in the late 1920s dealing with the transition from silent films to talkies. Starring Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds and Donald O’Connor, the movie was one of the first 25 films selected by the U.S. Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry.

“‘Singin’ In the Rain’ is a fancy package of musical entertainment with wide appeal and bright grossing prospects,” Variety ‘s review said. “Concocted by Arthur Freed with showmanship know-how, it glitters with color, talent and tunes, and an infectious air that will click with ticket buyers in all types of situations.”

Seven Samurai (1954)

Epic samurai action film “Seven Samurai” follows the story of a village of farmers in 1586 who seek to hire samurai to protect their crops from thieves. The film was the most expensive movie made in Japan at the time.

“Director Akira Kurosawa has given this a virile mounting,” Variety ‘s review said. “It is primarily a man’s film, with the brief romantic interludes also done with taste. Each character is firmly molded. Toshiro Mifune as the bold, hairbrained but courageous warrior weaves a colossal portrait. He dominates the picture although he has an extremely strong supporting cast.”

The Terminator (1984)

Sci-fi action film “The Terminator” follows a cyborg assassin (Arnold Schwarzenegger) sent back in time to kill Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), whose son will one day save mankind from extinction from artificial intelligence, Skynet. Co-written and directed by James Cameron and co-written and produced by Gale Anne Hurd, the film topped the U.S. box office for two weeks and grossed $78.3 million.

“‘The Terminator,’ which opens today at Loews State and other theaters, is a B-movie with flair. Much of it, as directed by James Cameron (‘Piranha II’), has suspense and personality, and only the obligatory mayhem becomes dull,” wrote Janet Maslin in a New York Times review. “There is far too much of the latter, in the form of car chases, messy shootouts and Mr. Schwarzenegger’s slamming brutally into anything that gets in his way. Far better are the scenes that follow Sarah (Linda Hamilton) from cheerful obliviousness to the grim knowledge that someone horrible is on her trail.”

Toy Story (1995)

Animated comedy film “Toy Story” follows the first adventures of cowboy doll Woody and space cadet action figure Buzz Lightyear. Owned by a boy named Andy, Woody and Buzz are a part of a group of toys that spring to life when humans aren’t around. Birthed after the success of Pixar’s short film “Tin Toy,” “Toy Story” was the first feature film from Pixar and the first entirely computer-animated feature film.

“To swipe Buzz’s motto –“To infinity and beyond”–“Toy Story” aims high to go where no animator has gone before,” wrote Leonard Klady in a 1995 Variety film review . “Fears at mission control of the whole effort crashing to Earth proved unwarranted; this is one entertainment that soars to new heights.”

Toy Story 2 (1999)

“Toy Story 2” continues Woody and Buzz Lightyear’s journey as the co-leaders of the toy group. When Woody is stolen by a toy collector, Buzz and the other toys must find set out to find him. During his time with the collector, Woody meets Jessie and Stinky Pete, other toys also based on characters from the TV show “Woody’s Roundup.” The animated film was originally supposed to be a direct-to-video sequel, but was upgraded to a theatrical release by Disney.

“In the realm of sequels, “Toy Story 2″ is to “Toy Story” what “The Empire Strikes Back” was to its predecessor, a richer, more satisfying film in every respect,” wrote former chief film critic Todd McCarthy in a 1999 Variety film review . “The comparison between these two franchises will be pursued no further, given their utter dissimilarity. But John Lasseter and his team, their confidence clearly bolstered by the massive success of their 1995 blockbuster, have conspired to vigorously push the new entry further with fresh characters, broadened scope, boisterous humor and, most of all, a gratifying emotional and thematic depth.”

Deliver Us From Evil (2006)

“Deliver Us From Evil” is a documentary that follows the case of convicted pedophile Oliver O’Grady, who molested approximately 25 children as a priest in northern California between the late 1970s through early 1990s. Filmmaker Amy Berg tracks O’Grady down to Ireland, where he was deported after being convicted of child molestation in 1993 and serving seven years in prison.

“Given how strong this kind of testimony is, “Deliver Us From Evil’s” decision to hype it more than it needs to be is unfortunate,” L.A. Times film critic Kenneth Turan said about the film in a 2006 review. “The film has a weakness for over-dramatization, for unsettling music and portentous close-ups of O’Grady’s hands and lips that are distracting and unnecessary.”

“There is nothing over-dramatic, however, about the deeply painful testimony of the adults who were victimized as children and their still traumatized parents,” he continued. “’He was the closest thing to God that we knew,’ one mother says. ‘I let the wolf in through the gate.'”

Taxi to the Dark Side (2007)

“Taxi to the Dark Side” is a documentary film directed by Alex Gibney about the 2002 killing of an Afghan taxi drive named Dilawar, who was beaten to death by American soldiers while being detained without a trial and interrogated at a black site, a detention center operated by a state where prisoners are incarcerated without due process or court order.

The film was a part of the “Why Democracy?” series, produced by The Why Foundation, which consisted of 10 documentary films examining democracy.

“Gibney (“Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room”) has crafted more than just an important document of systemic abuse — he’s stripped the rhetoric from official doublespeak to expose a callous disregard for not only the Geneva Conventions but the vision of the Founding Fathers,” writes Jay Weissberg in a Variety film review . “All enemies in wartime are perceived as animals, but Gibney uncovers the ways the White House and Pentagon have encouraged torture while distancing themselves from responsibility.”

Man on Wire (2008)

James Marsh’s “Man on Wire” documents the death-defining hire-wire stunts of Philippe Petit, who in 1974, performed a tightrope walk between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. “For contemporary audiences, Petit’s moment of mastery is inevitably shot through with a sense of loss; the following scenes, which reveal the band’s subsequent dissolution, reaffirm the bittersweet truth that triumph is but fleeting,” wrote Catherine Wheatley, who reviewed the film for Sight and Sound in 2010. “The film’s vision, though, is ultimately uplifting: relationships, like buildings, can collapse into rubble, but as [Annie Allix] tenderly puts it, sometimes ‘It is beautiful that way’.”

Poetry (2010)

Lee Chang-dong’s “Poetry” chronicles the life of Mija, a Korean grandmother who is simultaneously dealing with an early-onset Alzheimer’s diagnosis and the violent crime committed by her teenage grandson. “Now is the time to bestow on yourself the gift of one of the most, well, poetic films of 2010,” Lisa Kennedy wrote for the Denver Post in 2011. “And by ‘poetic,’ we mean rich with soulful pauses that are at once visual and aural and deeply observant of the dance of routine and quiet surprise.”

Waste Land (2010)

Lucy Walker’s “Waste Land” follows modern artist Vik Muniz to Jardim Gramacho, Brazil, the world’s largest landfill. There, he photographs the work of “catadores,” men and women who collect the refuse to recreate classical art. Legendary film critic Roger Ebert wrote for the Chicago Sun-Times in 2011, “I do not mean to make their lives seem easy or pleasant. It is miserable work, even after they grow accustomed to the smell. But it is useful work, and I have been thinking much about the happiness to be found by work that is honest and valuable.”

The Square (2013)

“The Square” is a documentary film by Jehane Noujaim, which follows Egyptian revolutionaries during the Egyptian Crisis, a period that started with the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 at Tahrir Square and lasted for three years. The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and won three Emmys.

“Continuing to follow a group of activists as they rally against the undue powers of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Army, ‘The Square’ understands that the Revolution itself is a work in progress, and while its immediacy means it, too, will soon be superseded, it stands as a vigorous, useful account,” writes Jay Weissberg in a 2013 Variety film review .

Gloria (2013)

Sebastián Lelio’s “Gloria” follows the relationship between an aging divorce and an amusement park operator after their chance encounter at a singles disco. “With someone else in the central role, ‘Gloria’ might have been cloyingly sentimental or downright maudlin,” wrote Joe Morgenstern in his 2014 Wall St. Journal review. “With [Paulina García] on hand, it’s a mostly convincing celebration of unquenchable energy.”

The Tale of Princess Kaguya (2014)

Isao Takahata’s “The Tale of Princess Kaguya” tells the fable of a beautiful young woman who sends her suitors away on impossible tasks in hopes of avoiding a loveless marriage. In a 2015 review for Sight and Sound, Andrew Osmond wrote, “While the characters feel very simplified at times, there are scenes that put great weight on performance and subtle expressions, in a way that’s nearer to the classical Disney tradition than most Japanese animation.”

Seymour: An Introduction (2014)

Ethan Hawke’s documentary “Seymour: An Introduction” chronicles the life of Seymour Bernstein, a concert pianist who, at age 50, gave up performing to become an educator and composer. “Coming off of his superb one-two performances for Richard Linklater in ‘Before Midnight’ and ‘Boyhood,’ Hawke continues to work at a creative high level,” wrote Bruce Ingram in his 2015 review for the Chicago Sun-Times. “He demonstrates a rapport and openness with his subject that proves exceptionally affecting.”

Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem (2014)

From directors Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz, “Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem” follows an Israeli woman’s three-year battle to separate from her husband who refuses to dissolve their marriage. “Ultimately the movie is wearying, but then it’s likely supposed to be,” Tom Long wrote for Detroit News in 2015. “If Viviane’s going through the wringer, you’re going through the wringer too.”

One Cut of the Dead (2017)

Shin’ichirô Ueda’s “One Cut of the Dead” follows Director Higurashi and his crew who attempt to shoot a zombie movie at an abandoned WWII Japanese facility. Things go wrong when they realize they are being attacked by real zombies. In his 2019 Los Angeles Times review, Carlos Aguilar called the film, “A master class in endless narrative inventiveness and an ode to the resourceful and collaborative spirit of hands-on filmmaking, ‘One Cut of the Dead’ amounts to an explosively hilarious rarity.”

Leave No Trace (2018)

Debra Granik’s “Leave No Trace” follows a father and daughter hiding in the forests of Portland, Ore. When a misstep tips off their location to local authorities, they must escape and find a new place to call home. Peter Travers wrote in his 2018 Rolling Stone review, “Debra Granik’s drama about a damaged war vet (Ben Foster) living off the grid with his teen daughter, brilliantly played by breakout star Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie, is hypnotic, haunting and one of the year’s best.”

Summer 1993 (2018)

Carla Simón’s “Summer 1993” is told through the eyes of six-year-old Frida, who watches in silence as her recently deceased mother’s last possessions are packed into boxes. “Some creatures are able to grow new limbs,” wrote Joe Morgenstern in his 2018 Wall Street Journal review. “Frida, given more than half a chance after demanding it, achieves something no less remarkable. She grows new joy and hope.”

Minding the Gap (2018)

“Minding the Gap” follows the relationship of three boys who use skateboarding as an outlet to escape their hardships at home. “The film captures more than a decade long documentary footage showcasing their friendship. In some documentaries, the filmmakers attempt to make themselves invisible. Despite Liu’s camera-shyness, he never pretends to be anything other than a part of the story, hitting his subjects with direct, deeply personal questions,” wrote Peter Debruge, who reviewed the film for Variety in 2018.

Honeyland (2019)

“Honeyland” is a Macedonian documentary film that was directed by Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov. The movie follows a woman and her beekeeping traditions to cultivate honey in the mountains of North Macedonia. Guy Lodge from Variety describes “Honeyland” as it begins as a “calm, captured-in-amber character study, before stumbling upon another, more conflict-driven story altogether — as younger interlopers on the land threaten not just Hatidze’s solitude but her very livelihood with their newer, less nature-conscious farming methods,” he said.

Welcome to Chechnya (2020)

“Welcome to Chechnya” released in 2020, exposes Russian leader Ramzan Kadyrov and his government as they try to detain, torture and execute LGBTQ Chechens. “A vital, pulse-quickening new documentary from journalist-turned-filmmaker David France that urgently lifts the lid on one of the most horrifying humanitarian crises of present times: the state-sanctioned purge of LGBTQ people in the eponymous southern Russian republic,” wrote Guy Lodge from Variety in 2020.

Crip Camp (2020)

“Crip Camp” is based on Camp Jened, which was a summer camp for teens with disabilities in the ’70s that inspired real-life activism. The film eliminates stereotypes and challenges the way people think about disabilities. “It may be startling for those who haven’t spent time with people with cerebral palsy or polio to see how a paraplegic gets from his wheelchair into the pool,” wrote Peter Debruge for Variety in 2020. “On closer inspection, it becomes clear that these teenagers…are having the time of their lives.”

76 Days (2020)

“76 Days” is a documentary released on Netflix in 2020 that shows the struggles of medical professionals and patients in Wuhan, China dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. “As an artifact alone, the result is remarkable, capturing all the panic and pragmatism greeting a disaster before its entire global impact had been gauged, while strategies and protocols are adjusted on the hoof,” wrote Guy Lodge for Variety in 2020. “That it’s so artfully and elegantly observed, and packs such a candid wallop of feeling, atop its frontline urgency is testament to the grace and sensitivity of its directorial team, not just their timely savvy.”

His House (2020)

“His House” is a horror movie that initially released on Netflix and terrified audiences. The plot follows a refugee couple that try to create a new life for themselves in an English town by escaping South Sudan but find their new home is haunted. Jessica Kiang reviewed the film for Variety in 2020 and wrote “‘His House’ is at its most persuasively terrifying when it gets out of the house and into the existential terror of reality. Out there are aspects of the refugee experience that contain greater horrors and mortifications than all the blackening plaster, childish ghostly humming and skittering presences in the walls could ever hope to suggest.”

Quo Vadis, Aida? (2020)

“Quo Vadis, Aida?” documents the journey of Aida, a translator for the U.N. in Srebrenica interpreting the crime taking place when the Serbian army takes over the Bosnian town. “This is not historical revisionism, if anything, ‘Quo Vadis, Aida?’ works to un-revise history, re-centering the victims’ plight as the eye of a storm of evils — not only the massacre itself, but the broader evils of institutional failure and international indifference,” wrote Jessica Kiang, who reviewed the film in 2020 for Variety.

Hive (2021)

“Hive” tells the true story about a woman, Fahrije, who becomes an entrepreneur, after her husband goes missing during the Kosovo War. She sells her own red pepper ajvar and honey, and recruiting more women to join her. “Within the heavily patriarchal hierarchy of the country’s rural society, this places these maybe-widows in an impossible situation, especially when, like Fahrije, they have a family to care for,” writes Jessica Kiang for Variety . “They are expected to wait in continual expectation of their breadwinner-husbands’ return, subsisting on paltry welfare handouts, because to take a job or set up a business is looked on not only as a subversion of the natural order, but as a sign of disrespect to the husband and possibly loose morals.” 

Descendant (2022)

Netflix described its 2022 film, saying, “Descendants of the enslaved Africans on an illegal ship that arrived in Alabama in 1860 seek justice and healing when the craft’s remains are discovered.” “This past remains present, Brown shows, as activists explain how the land on which Africatown (formerly Magazine Point) was established once belonged to Meaher, who sold some of it to former slaves.,” wrote Peter Debruge for Variety . “Talk of racial injustice calls for nuance, and it’s impressive just how many facets of the conversation Brown is able to include in her film.”

20 Days in Mariupol (2023)

“20 Days in Mariupol” tells the story of a group of Ukrainian journalists who are trapped in Mariupol during the Russian invasion and struggle to continue documenting the war. The film is directed by Mstyslav Chernov, a Ukrainian director and it won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature Film in 2024. “Powerful as those glimpses were to international viewers, Chernov doesn’t spare his documentary more brutally sustained moments,” wrote Dennis Harvey for Variety . “There’s no political analysis or sermonizing here, just a punishingly up-close look at the toll of modern warfare on a population.”

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The 100 best British movies

We spoke to over 150 movie experts and writers to put together this definitive list of British films

How exactly does one define British cinema? It’s more difficult to nail down than it seems. Okay, so the accents usually give it away. But the essential qualities of the best British movies are as wide-ranging as the Commonwealth itself. In terms of the stories it tells, it’s basically limitless. Want a widescreen epic? Go straight to the work of David Lean or Powell and Pressburger. In the market for a smaller, more personal drama? Try Joanna Hogg or Shane Meadows. Thrillers? Comedies? Period dramas? Movies about drugs? Movies that seem to be on drugs themselves? The UK film industry has produced them all, each displaying a distinctly English slant.

In compiling this list of the best British movies of all-time, we surveyed a diverse array of actors, directors, writers, producers, critics and industry heavyweights, from Wes Anderson, Mike Leigh, Ken Loach, Sam Mendes and Terence Davies, David Morrissey, Sally Hawkins and Thandiwe Newton. Unsurprisingly, the results are as diverse as the country itself.

Written by  Dave Calhoun, Tom Huddleston, David Jenkins, Derek Adams, Geoff Andrew, Adam Lee Davies, Paul Fairclough, Wally Hammond, Alim Kheraj, Matthew Singer & Phil de Semlyen

Recommended:

💂 50 great British actors 🔥 The 100 best movies of all-time 🎥 The 100 best movies of the 20th century so far 🇬🇧 The 100 best London songs 

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100-91 Best British Movies

100.  In This World (2002)

Director Michael Winterbottom Cast  Jamal Udin Torabi, Enayatullah The first of three films by the prolific Michael Winterbottom on this list, ‘In This World’ is the best example of the director’s urge to explore contemporary issues on screen and to employ cinema as a sideways view on current affairs. This, ‘ Welcome to Sarajevo ’, ‘ Road to Guantanamo ’ and ' A Mighty Heart ' were all films discussed on news pages as well as in arts reviews. ‘In This World’ is admirable as a feat: Winterbottom cast two Afghan refugees in Pakistan and with a small crew shooting on digital cameras took them on a journey west over land, through Iran, Turkey and Europe, eventually arriving in London. At a time of headlines about immigration and political trouble in Afghanistan, the effect was to offer an alternative spin on the news and to do it in a manner that made clear the often terrible realities of being a refugee. DC

99.  The Railway Children (1970)

• Family and kids

Director Lionel Jeffries Cast Dinah Sheridan, William Mervyn, Jenny Agutter

As warm and cosy as a cup of Horlicks, Lionel Jeffries’s 1970 adaptation of E Nesbit’s Edwardian children’s novel centres on a well-to-do London family torn apart when its patriarch is arrested on suspicion of treason. With a sudden urge to start life over in the country, the remaining family members – mother Dinah Sheridan and her three children – up sticks and settle alongside a quaint Yorkshire railway line where the film slowly begins to work its very English charm. Jenny Agutter and little Sally Thomsett are the film’s cornerstones, but a special mention to Bernard Cribbins’s archetypal British stationmaster. Naturally, the film won’t play well with today’s digital generation – it’s far too fusty and polite in both tone and colour – but it still has the capacity to generate fond childhood memories. Nice to see it make the list of best British movies, albeit in the penultimate spot. DA

Buy, rent or watch ‘The Railway Children’

98.  Dunkirk (2017)

Director Christopher Nolan

Cast Kenneth Branagh, Tom Hardy, Harry Styles

Never has a military defeat looked so victorious as in Christopher Nolan's trifecta of interlocking vignettes in this old-school-feeling epic. Entitled 'Land', 'Sea' and 'Air', they offered three pulse-ratcheting perspectives on the British desperate retreat from France in 1940. Tom Hardy's RAF pilot gets the hero moments, but kudos to Nolan for unearthing a bunch of talented relative unknowns too. We reckon that Harry Styles guy has a future. PDS

Buy, rent or watch ‘Dunkirk’

97.  28 Days Later… (2002)

Director Danny Boyle Cast Cillian Murphy, Naomie Harris, Brendan Gleeson

Oh no, not fast zombies! Those are the worst kind! Danny Boyle didn’t invent the concept of speedy flesheaters, nor the idea of setting a zombie outbreak in the UK. Nothing about 28 Days Later , frankly, is especially novel. And yet, it feels quite unlike any zombie movie before or since, to the degree that it nearly exists outside the genre. That’s not to say it skimps on scares; to the contrary, it includes some of the most horrifying set pieces of the last two decades. But there’s a humanistic quality in Boyle’s direction unique to the dark, dour canon of post-apocalyptic horror. The characters aren’t just meaty automatons who only exist to be disembowelled - they seem like actual, flesh-and-blood humans desperate to stay that way. (Cillian Murphy is particularly soulful as a bike courier who awakens from a coma in an abandoned London, the world as he knew it fully decimated in less than a month.) That makes it particularly tempting to draw parallels to our current pandemic-stricken world. If we must find some connection, let it be the upnote of hope at the end, when the film’s final word is not ‘help’ but rather ‘hello’.

96.  Theatre of Blood (1973)

Director Douglas Hickox Cast Vincent Price, Diana Rigg, Ian Hendry Vincent Price adopts the more psyched-out style of British horror in the ’70s in this serial-killer romp that gives the great man a crack at the Shakespearean roles he felt cinema had denied him. As Edward Lionheart, Price plays a ham passed over for the award he most cherishes: Best Actor as voted by the Critics’ Circle. His years of dedication to the Bard are dismissed by his beret-wearing tormenters but prove inspirational when he plots their murders: each is to be despatched in the manner of a Shakespearean death, from ‘Julius Caesar’s’ gang- knifing to a grisly rewriting of ‘The Merchant of Venice’ and the hard-to-swallow cuisine of ‘Titus Andronicus’. It’s a gory, funny trip, as Price dons a series of preposterous disguises to entrap his victims through their own foibles. His post-homicide delivery of Shakespeare will surprise anyone who bought his popular image as a one-dimensional hack, adding yet another layer to a film that satirises both its stars and audience without ever sacrificing its disconcerting edge. PF

Buy, rent or watch ‘Theatre of Blood’

95.  London to Brighton (2006)

Director Paul Andrew Williams Cast Lorraine Stanley, Johnny Harris, Georgia Groome The post ‘Lock, Stock…’ landscape is littered with the corpses of a thousand pretenders to the mockney gangster pic throne. Remember ‘ Rancid Aluminium ’? ‘ Love, Honour and Obey ’? ‘ The 51st State ’? ‘ Rise of the Footsoldier ’? Aside from Jonathan Glazer’s eminently stylish ‘ Sexy Beast ’, only Paul Andrew Williams’s pithy and relentlessly entertaining debut has managed to poke its head above the sea of mediocrity. A rape, revenge and road movie (in that order) about a distressed young girl (Georgia Groome) helped by a prostitute (Lorraine Stanley – stunning) to flee a gang of tinpot hoods, it’s a film where no shot, line and character is wasted. Williams claims to have written the film over one weekend, and both the clamp-like tightness of its structure and the bracingly realistic progression of its characters – if you get hurt, you stay hurt – make that entirely believable. DJ

Buy, rent or watch ‘London to Brighton’

94.  24 Hour Party People (2002)

Director Michael Winterbottom Cast Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon, Ron Cook

24 Hour Party People is the rare music biopic that understands historical accuracy is less crucial than getting the vibe right. That’s not to say Michael Winterbottom’s depiction of the Manchester punk scene of the late ’ 70s and ’80s is a lie - he just makes it clear that, when faced with either presenting the facts or perpetuating the myth, the myth will win out nearly every time. (After all, this is a movie where the Buzzcocks’ Howard Devoto pops up while his avatar is having sex in a club bathroom with another man’s wife to dispute the veracity of the encounter.) And anyway, how could anyone hope to parse truth from fiction when dealing with martyr figures like Joy Division’s Ian Curtis, perpetually soused Happy Mondays frontman Shaun Ryder and professional self-aggrandizers like Factory Records founder Tony Wilson? Best, again, to focus on capturing the vibe, and to that end, Winterbottom pulls out every postmodernist trick he knows, from fourth-wall breaking to to snarky voiceovers to rewinds and freeze-frames. It’s dizzying, maddening, hilarious and nonstop - and in that way, it gets the story exactly right.

93.  Zulu (1964)

• Action and adventure

Director Cy Endfield Cast Stanley Baker, Jack Hawkins, Michael Caine ‘Zulu’ may take a few liberties with the exact levels of Welshness on show during the Battle of Rorke’s Drift, but – Richard Burton, Catherine Zeta-Jones and gold-standard Richard Burton impersonator Anthony Hopkins notwithstanding –Welsh film fans have never had all that much to cheer about. So we’re keeping this one! An account of the South Wales Border Regiment’s seemingly hopeless last-ditch stand against the massed ranks of the Zulu Nation, it’s a massively successful enterprise – especially from first-time producer (and star) Stanley Baker and a director previously known chiefly for low-budget noirs. That it still stirs the blood and moistens the eye proves that few films manage to be as expansive and yet so intimate as this. ALD

Buy, rent or watch ‘Zulu’

92.  Dead Man's Shoes (2004)

Director Shane Meadows Cast Paddy Considine, Gary Stretch, Toby Kebbell Shane Meadows’s fourth film shows the importance of staying true to your instincts. The Midlands director’s third film, ‘ Once Upon a Time in the Midlands ’ had seen him working with a bigger budget and a more recognisable cast (Rhys Ifans, Ricky Tomlinson, Robert Carlyle, Kathy Burke) and the result, if amiable, was much less raw, personal and anarchic than his first two features and earlier shorts. ‘Dead Man’s Shoes’ was an uncompromising and successful attempt by Meadows to rediscover his old voice. He cast old pal Paddy Considine, who had been gripping as a volatile loner in ‘ A Room for Romeo Brass ’, and went for the jugular with this tale of a man who seeks and dishes out violence in revenge for something terrible that happened in his family’s past. Considine is terrifying, and Meadows pulls no punches in painting a portrait of just how low men can go – for fun and for love. DC

91.  Land and Freedom (1995)

Director Ken Loach Cast Ian Hart, Icíar Bollaín, Tom Gilroy Ken Loach’s 1995 film about fatal splits on the Left during the Spanish Civil War – told from the viewpoint of David (Ian Hart), a Liverpudlian Communist who travels south to Spain to join the cause – achieved an epic look and feel while remaining committed to the cut and thrust of ground-level debate. It remains one of Loach’s most ambitious and important films both for its raw combat scenes and for the way it shines a light on a crucial moment in twentieth-century history. The focus of Jim Allen’s script on one group of militia allows for strong personalities with varying motivations and ideas to emerge, while the book-ending of the story with the discovery in the present of David’s letters by his granddaughter gives it a powerful immediacy. This British movie doubly confirmed Loach’s return from the wilderness in the 1980s and set a precedent for his later films exploring global stories in Nicaragua, Los Angeles and Ireland. DC

Buy, rent or watch ‘Land and Freedom’

90-81 Best British Movies

90.  Blue (1993)

8Director Derek Jarman Cast Tilda Swinton, John Quentin, Nigel Terry (voices) ‘My mind is bright as a button, but my body is falling apart.’ It’s rare that a ‘last film’ is conceived as such, but Derek Jarman knew he was dying from Aids-related illnesses when he made ‘Blue’ in 1993 – a film simultaneously broadcast on television and radio months before his death in 1994 at 52. It was his encroaching blindness, much referred to in the voiceover read by several actors, which gave Jarman the idea to apply words to an unchanging, blue screen for 76 minutes. The voiceover is a mix of diary and poetry, relating variously to Jarman’s illness, art and the colour blue. It’s a bold, moving work, but it’s Jarman’s ability to conjure up such a unique, experimental event as ‘Blue’ that we must remember and honour – the way that, with this avant-garde work, he drew attention to him, his work, sexuality and illness and made an unembarrassed, deathbed claim for art itself. DC

89.  The Go-Between (1970)

Director Joseph Losey Cast Julie Christie, Alan Bates, Dominic Guard ‘The past is another country. They do things differently there’: one of two Joseph Losey-Harold Pinter collaborations to feature in our poll (the other is ‘ The Servant ’) is this radiant and evocative adaptation of LP Hartley’s tale of thwarted love and class prejudice set against the halcyon British summer of 1900. It was dumped initially by MGM because of its supposed ‘difficulty’ but was subsequently the winner of the Cannes Palme d’Or and a box-office and critical success in the US. The reputations of both the film and late-career Losey went into decline in Britain (if not elsewhere) by the mid-1990s – in 1994 The Independent’s Anthony Quinn, typically, thought this film ‘overrated’ and part of Losey’s decline. But its complexity of feeling, the undoubted chemistry of its reunited stars Julie Christie and Alan Bates, the lushness of cinematographer Gerry Fisher’s Norfolk landscapes and the critical late-1960s sensibility provided by the acute eye and complex psychological insight of Losey – plus the revelatory use of time-frames, flashback and point-of-view in Pinter’s script – guarantee its lasting appeal. WH

Buy, rent or watch ‘The Go-Between’

88.  This Is England (2006)

Director Shane Meadows Cast Thomas Turgoose, Stephen Graham, Jo Hartley You could hear the British movie industry breathe a collective sigh of relief when writer-director Shane Meadows got the breakthrough hit he so richly deserved after much critical but little commercial success with his previous films. Clearly ripped from his own experiences, this rite-of-passage tale sees a naive, isolated youngster (Thomas Turgoose – a revelation) scooped up by some friendly skinheads and introduced to the joys of young love, ska, short hair and oversized, steel toe-capped Doc Martens. But Meadows’s film shows that this initially benign enclave was very different to the growing ranks of supporters of the National Front, even if their appearance was similar. The film established Meadows in a league of his own when it comes to naturalistic, comic dialogue and wringing sensitive performances from young cast members. It also confirmed him as a director whose predominant interest is in contrasting the invigorating highs and vicious lows of English working-class life. DJ

Buy, rent or watch ‘This Is England’

87.  Night and the City (1950)

Director Jules Dassin Cast Richard Widmark, Gene Tierney, Googie Withers London noir may have been more of a literary movement than a cinematic one, but its undoubted pinnacle – both on the page and screen – is ‘Night and the City’. The film may bear little relation to Gerald Kersh’s far nastier (and more grimly believable) source novel, but Jules Dassin’s stark, unforgiving direction, Max Greene’s oppressive monochrome cinematography and Richard Widmark’s twitchy central performance gives the movie a paranoid power all of its own. The centrepiece scene remains a staggering, emotionally draining wrestling match between avuncular old-timer Gregorius and new-fangled masked avenger The Strangler, arguably the most punishing fight ever committed to celluloid, five unforgiving minutes of sweat, muscle and dogged determination. TH

86.  The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)

Director David Lean Cast Alec Guinness, William Holden, Jack Hawkins Not even the breeze coming off his twirling moral compass can keep Alec Guinness’s stiff upper lip from wilting in the maddening Burmese heat during David Lean’s truly epic – as opposed to simply lengthy – meditation on the possibilities of humane behaviour in wartime. Guinness is otherwise in fine form as a captured British colonel overseeing Allied troops charged with assisting the Japanese war effort by building said bridge across said river. William Holden’s engaging, wiseacre American GI, on the other hand, is quite unshakeable in his belief that the war would get on quite well without him thank you very much, and spends an enviable amount of the film goosing the nurses in a Ceylon military hospital. Ultimately, both men’s attitudes are compromised to the greater good as the bridge comes crashing down in a riveting scene of unbridled catharsis. ALD

Buy, rent or watch ‘The Bridge on the River Kwai’

85.  God's Own Country (2017)

Director Francis Lee

Cast Josh O’Connor, Alec Secareanu

To label Francis Lee’s feature directorial debut as Yorkshire’s answer to ‘ Brokeback Mountain ’ does the film and its actors a disservice. While both films feature the farming of sheep and two men who, while camping in the hinterland, share an intense sexual and romantic bond, the similarities end there. ‘God’s Own Country’ is more of a quiet love story that avoids melodrama for internal struggles with isolation, loneliness and the stark circumstances of hard rural lives. The inability of protagonist Johnny Saxby to open up is delivered with piercing melancholy and palpable physical frustration by Josh O’Connor. This is contrasted with Alec Secareanu’s portrayal of the thoughtful Gheorghe, who exudes a gentle sensitivity. Their unlikely love affair will melt even the most jaded of hearts. AK

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84.  Fish Tank (2009)

Director Andrea Arnold Cast Katie Jarvis, Kierston Wareing, Michael Fassbender Former kids’ TV presenter Andrea Arnold, 49, came to attention in 2005 when she declared live on television that it was ‘the dog’s bollocks’ to be awarded an Oscar for her short film, ‘Wasp’. Since then, she has made two features, ‘ Red Road ’ and ‘Fish Tank’, both of which triumphed at Cannes. Like ‘Red Road’, ‘Fish Tank’ intimately explores the life of one female character on a housing estate, this time potty-mouthed teen Mia (Katie Jarvis), who falls into a relationship with her mum’s new boyfriend (Michael Fassbender). The beauty of Arnold’s films lies in their poetry and brilliance at expressing interior feelings through quiet observation. Arnold was awarded an OBE at the end of 2010 and is now finishing a version of ‘Wuthering Heights’ populated by little-known actors. We suspect – and hope – that Arnold is not about to cross over to the mainstream any time soon. DC

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83.  A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929)

Director Anthony Asquith Cast Hans Adalbert von Schlettow, Uno Henning, Norah Baring  Better known for his sterling Terence Rattigan adaptations ‘The Winslow Boy’ (1948) and ‘ The Browning Version ’ (1951), Anthony Asquith’s recently re-appraised silent melodrama is totally deserving of its place on this list of best British movies and is perhaps the biggest reminder of how much the age of the DVD has allowed us better access to such hidden gems. Edited with the quick-chopping fury of a Darren Aronofsky movie, this pacy and occasionally very funny film looks at a love triangle forming at a busy barber’s shop: hairdresser Joe (Uno Henning) is madly in love with manicurist Sally (Norah Baring) but can’t quite seal the deal, a fact of which Dartmoor farmer and regular customer Harry takes full advantage. As Joe’s jealousy escalates, Asquith’s direction takes on more weird and wonderful forms, referencing silent comedy, German expressionism and Russian montage, sometimes all in the same scene. When violence erupts, it’s swift and brutal, but the film’s main pleasure is its pragmatic handling of the central romance. DJ

Buy, rent or watch ‘The Cottage on Dartmoor’

82.  Orlando (1993)

Director Sally Potter Cast Tilda Swinton, Billy Zane, John Wood Tilda Swinton is said to be planning a collaboration with Apichatpong Weerasethakul, director of ‘ Uncle Boonmee… ’, and if the Thai dream weaver is in any doubt about casting her in one of his metaphysical opuses, he need only watch Sally Potter’s Jarmanesque time, space and gender-switching adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel, ‘Orlando: A Biography’. What’s clear from the off is that Swinton and Potter possess an acute understanding of the droll subtleties of the text about an immortal nobleman who leaves his stamp on various points in modern history and then transforms from man to woman. The film is not merely about the strictures of gender through the ages, but also an essay on the nature of evolution (the Godardian final shot even switches from film to video) and it scores points through knowing casting (Quentin Crisp as Queen Elizabeth I!) and production design that’s just jaw-droppingly plush for what must’ve been a modest budget. DJ

Buy, rent or watch ‘Orlando’

81.  Dr No (1962)

Director Terence Young Cast Sean Connery, Ursula Andress, Joseph Wiseman It might look fresh today, but ‘Dr No’ must have seemed like ‘ Avatar ’ to post-war British audiences. A transgressive explosion of colour, exoticism, modernity and impetuous sex, James Bond’s first mission sees the imperious Sean Connery saunter through an overripe cocktail of Caribbean intrigue abetted by Jack ‘Hawaii Five-O’ Lord as his shifty CIA opposite number Felix Leiter and Ursula Andress as racy cockler, Honey Ryder, all of whom are variously hot under the collar for the bionic hide of Dr Julius No – major player in the Spectre spy organisation we shall become all-too familiar with in further instalments. The bad doctor is the first of many Bond supervillains to crave global domination, but when ‘Dr No’ made its million-dollar budget back 109 times over, it was immediately clear that 007 had come out on top – and would be back for more. ALD

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80-71 Best British Movies

80.  Under the Skin (1997)

Director Carine Adler Cast Samantha Morton, Claire Rushbrook, Rita Tushingham Women directed only four of our top 100 British movies, although perhaps we should celebrate that all four of those are from the last 20 years, which might suggest the gender gap in cinema is gradually closing. (When the BFI organised a similar poll in 1999, not one director on their list was a woman.) That said, the careers of two of those four directors, Lynne Ramsay and Carine Adler, have stalled in recent years and only Andrea Arnold seems able to move easily from film to film. So far Adler’s 1997 film ‘Under the Skin’ is her one and only feature, but it still remains rare for offering a female writer-director’s view on a woman’s extreme sexuality as a young Liverpudlian woman Iris (Samantha Morton) embraces promiscuity and a heightened sexual awareness as part of the grieving process in the wake of her mother’s death from cancer. Adler might not have fulfilled her promise – but this film launched Morton as one of our most bold and smart young actresses. DC

Buy, rent or watch ‘Under the Skin’

79.  The Offence (1972)

Director Sidney Lumet Cast Sean Connery, Trevor Howard, Vivien Merchant American filmmaker Sidney Lumet brought a keen outsider’s eye to this deliriously depressing slab of British noir. Sean Connery is at his cruel, bullying best as an immoral police detective on the trail of a child molester – a mission that leads to a harrowing, tragic face-off with grateful suspect Ian Bannen and to a long, dark night of the soul in which all the horrors, mis-steps and dismembered bodies Connery has psychically stockpiled over 20 years on the force coalesce into a grisly butcher’s bill that he has no hope of meeting. The film displeased United Artists – who funded it as a thank you to Connery for wigging his way through the previous year’s ‘ Diamonds Are Forever ’, and who didn’t want 007 to be viewed as any more of a pitiless shitbag than strictly necessary – and went unreleased in many countries. But it’s outstanding quality remains undeniable. As does its capacity to unsettle. ALD

Buy, rent or watch ‘The Offence’

78.  Billy Liar (1963)

Director John Schlesinger Cast Tom Courtenay, Julie Christie, Wilfred Pickles Few films exemplify the fearsome contradictions inherent in British filmmaking better than ‘Billy Liar’. Is it better to dream of a better world, or to keep both feet planted firmly in the real one? Is escapism a creative act, or an indulgence? Is social class really the thing that keeps us apart, or is it just a convenient distraction? And is London really the promised land, or just a place to ‘lose yourself’? While director John Schlesinger and writer Keith Waterhouse don’t really come up with much in the way of actual answers – perhaps there is no satisfactory solution to Billy’s dilemma – they do a superb job of asking the right questions. Tom Courtenay is unforgettable in the title role, and Julie Christie’s fleeting, flitting presence is as convincing a ‘star is born’ moment as British film has to offer. TH

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77.  Piccadilly (1929)

Director EA Dupont Cast Anna May Wong, Gilda Gray, Jameson Thomas One of the oldest British movies on our list is this glorious silent-era melodrama set mainly in London’s West End in the late 1920s but which takes detours to the slums of Limehouse and to the showbiz world’s less glamorous nooks and crannies. Made on the cusp of the sound era (and a ‘talkie’ prologue exists as an extra on the BFI’s recent DVD), the film has a vibrant, jazz-age energy to it that takes its cue from the dance scenes on the floor of Valentine Wilmot’s (Jameson Thomas) Piccadilly Club – where Charles Laughton has an amusing cameo as a disgruntled diner. Anna May Wong gives an empowering performance as the dancer Shosho and her first appearance, dancing on the sideboard in the club’s scullery, feels as luminous and provocative today as it surely must have in the late 1920s. For us, the film is also a thrilling imagining (almost entirely studio-shot, of course) of a long-gone city. DC

Buy, rent or watch ‘Piccadilly’

76.  Scum (1979)

Director Alan Clarke Cast  Ray Winstone, Mick Ford, Julian Firth, John Blundell There have been many movies set inside British lock-ups, ranging from grim and gritty (‘Hunger’, ‘Starred Up’) to oddly jaunty (‘The Italian Job’, ‘Paddington 2’). None of them packs quite the wallop of Alan Clarke’s hugely influential portrayal of life inside of a British borstal. A 22-year-old Ray Winstone is a revelation as Carlin, an offender who finds grimace-inducing things to do with a sock, a couple of snooker balls and his fellow inmates’s jaws. But the violence is all in service of the message, here, as Clarke sets about dismantling brutalising power structures, racism and the disinterest of officialdom in these young lives. Watch it for free here and you’ll still feel its surge of electricity.  

75.  A Room for Romeo Brass (1999)

Director Shane Meadows Cast Paddy Considine, Andrew Shim, Ben Marshall The importance of imperfection cannot be overlooked in British movies: while there’s plenty to be said for the studied slickness of Hitchcock or Lean, I’ll take the shaggy-edged, off-kilter unpredictability of ‘ A Canterbury Tale ’, ‘ Kes ’ or ‘Romeo Brass’ any day. This was Meadows’s second film, his trickiest, his loosest and perhaps his best. It marks the debut screen appearance of Paddy Considine, and though it’s easy (and probably appropriate) to refer to him as our De Niro, it took Bob five years to get to Johnny Boy, while Paddy knocked it flat first time in the ring. The edge-of-your-seat savagery of his performance, contrasted with the sweet-natured, bucolic nature of the central friendship, makes for a more honest and believable portrayal of the shift into adulthood than 100 prim and polished pretenders. TH

74.  Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994)

Director Mike Newell Cast Hugh Grant, Andie MacDowell, Kristin Scott Thomas  The film that set Hugh Grant on the road towards ‘ Notting Hill ’ and a varied career as Britain’s jester of romcom. Using one of Richard Curtis’s less cheesy screenplays, director Newell fashioned a richly rewarding and funny microcosm of various relationships centred mostly around Grant’s likeable bachelor, Charles. The film benefits from a raft of well-observed moments – the subtle comedy of Rowan Atkinson’s tongue-tied vicar, for instance – yet emotions are cleverly twisted once we attend the funeral and the film’s sole serious moment. It’s this scene alone – in which John Hannah reads WH Auden’s poem ‘Funeral Blues’ – that cast the greatest influence over audiences. Emotionally honest and full of human warmth, ‘Four Weddings…’ stands out as one of the most enjoyable of British romcoms. And what’s more, it’s the only film in this list to open with the word ‘fuck!’ DA

Buy, rent or watch ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’

73.  The Man in the White Suit (1951)

Director Alexander Mackendrick Cast Alec Guinness, Joan Greenwood, Cecil Parker The price of progress Of all the top-rank Ealing comedies, ‘The Man in the White Suit’ is the one which least deserves the tag, partly because it’s not meant to be funny, and partly because it diverges so much from the Ealing template: it’s not set in London, it doesn’t feature wisecracking criminals, plodding bobbies or apple-cheeked tykes, and it eschews good-natured patriotism in favour of a rather cold, even misanthropic view of class-obsessed workers and short-sighted bosses. Alec Guinness’s blinkered scientist Sidney is every bit as irksome as Professor Marcus in ‘ The Ladykillers ’, but quieter, subtler and less flashy, and while gravel-throated Joan Greenwood and simpering beau Michael Gough feel like a stereotypical Ealing couple, there’s something pathetic about the way they’re so powerless to affect the course of events. The result is a genuinely unusual film: part political treatise, part social satire, even part science fiction, all building towards a magnificently unsettling climax of mob justice. TH

Buy, rent or watch ‘The Man in the White Suit’

72.  The Long Day Closes (1992)

Director Terence Davies Cast Marjorie Yates, Leigh McCormack, Anthony Watson It’s clear Davies believes we are shaped by the movies we watch. If Fellini saw life as a circus, then Davies sees life as a cinema. Young Bud (Leigh McCormack) is his alter ego, and this is a rhapsodic scrapbook of memories from a working-class Liverpool childhood accompanied by dispatches from the wireless, popular songs and rousing classical standards. Davies rejects a linear narrative in favour of creating layers of emotion through a succession of detached scenes such as Bud’s attempts to get into a cinema and his presence at a drunken family sing-song. But first and foremost this is a film which weighs up the consolations of cinema against the consolations of religion, and – if we are to read anything into the final shot of Bud and a friend watching a film of clouds drifting by starlight as Arthur Sullivan’s song ‘The Long Day Closes’ plays in the background – cinema wins by a mile. DJ

Buy, rent or watch ‘The Long Day Closes’

71.  Edvard Munch (1974)

Director Peter Watkins Cast Geir Westby, Gro Fraas, Iselin von Hanno Bart Left-leaning director Watkins is most famous for the challenging, innovative, vérité-style docs he made in the mid-1960s for the BBC (see ‘ Culloden ’). The negative reaction to – and 20-year banning of – his exposure of the threat of nuclear war in ‘ The War Game ’ (1965) led him into self-imposed, globe-trotting exile and obscurity. Even his masterpiece, ‘Edvard Munch’ – a beautiful, heartbreaking and extraordinarily empathetic three-and-a-half hour meditation on the life and work of the Norwegian painter describing ‘the illness, insanity and death’ that pre-occupied the artist’s life – was largely unavailable for 20-or-so years. It’s surprising therefore to see a place in this poll for a hitherto neglected classic of British cinema, as well as further testament to the power and necessity of DVD revivals. WH

70-61 Best British Movies

70.  Bad Timing (1980)

Director Nicolas Roeg Cast Art Garfunkel, Theresa Russell, Harvey Keitel It might have divided the critics with its disturbing notions of sexuality on its release, but ‘Bad Timing’ has grown in reputation to be counted amongst Nicolas Roeg’s best. His mastery of kaleidoscopic inter-cutting techniques – though subdued here – has never found better employment than the chronological quick-step and intersecting flashbacks he uses to reveal the psychosexual labyrinths of a fateful off/on love affair between Theresa Russell’s free-spirited boozehound and Art Garfunkel’s collected, monopolising, Malboro-smoking psychoanalyst. Set amid the icy old-world charm of Vienna, the fragmentary romantic drama builds into a hallucinatory thriller, as Harvey Keitel’s police detective – sans accent but with killer shoulder-length John the Baptist locks – begins to question Garfunkel over Russell’s abortive suicide attempt and forces us to reconsider all that’s gone before. ALD

Buy, rent or watch ‘Bad Timing’

69.  Oliver! (1968)

Director Carol Reed Cast Ron Moody, Shani Wallis, Oliver Reed For someone who couldn’t play a note of music, Lionel Bart sure knew how to pen a memorable ditty. ‘Consider Yourself’, ‘Got to Pick a Pocket or Two’ and the title song are all up there with the best in the musical genre. Carol Reed’s 1968 film is essentially a watered-down, family-friendly reworking of Dickens’s oft-adapted novel. But with its dark, grimy Dickensian squalor (courtesy of one of Shepperton Studios’ most authentic sets – now sadly dismantled), Oliver Reed’s memorably chilling arch crim Bill Sikes, and at least one shocking murder, the film also displayed a level of foreboding darkness capable of scaring the bejesus out of younger viewers. The rest of the casting, too, is mostly spot-on, none more so than Ron Moody’s iconically OTT performance as slimy child-gang leader, Fagin. A fabulously entertaining family musical, then, but one that, I suspect, is on this list for nostalgic value alone. DA

Buy, rent or watch ‘Oliver!’

68.  Dead of Night (1945)

Directors Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden, Robert Hamer Cast Mervyn Johns, Michael Redgrave, Roland Culver   Modern audiences heading into Ealing’s portmanteau chiller keenly anticipating the film Martin Scorsese picked as the fifth scariest movie ever (and also inspired Fred Hoyle to formulate his ‘Steady State’ theory of cosmological expansion, science fans) may find themselves wondering, for a while, what all the fuss was about. The framing narrative, set in a delightful country house populated by jolly upper-crust eccentrics, is more cosy than creepy, the first three episodes – the psychic racing driver, the Victorian children’s party and the haunted mirror – while increasingly ominous, are hardly hair-raising, while the fourth is intentionally funny. So it’s upon Cavalcanti’s closing tale that the film’s reputation rests: the story of a disturbed ventriloquist – or a possessed dummy – has been done so often that one might expect the thrill to have gone. Not so – the final 15 minutes of ‘Dead of Night’ remains the pinnacle of pre-Hammer homemade horror, a truly disturbing flight into the arms of madness. TH

Buy, rent or watch ‘Dead of Night’

67.  Whisky Galore! (1949)

Director Alexander Mackendrick Cast Basil Radford, Joan Greenwood, Jean Cadell In the post-war years, a number of films were made on both sides of the Atlantic intended to extol national virtues, restore civic pride and celebrate those values which make us who we are. But while the Yanks were busily indulging their national tendency towards flag-waving, pie-making, gingham-sewing and casual racism, we Brits were more likely to sing the praises of pastimes such as authority-baiting, petty larceny and the simple pleasure of drinking to the verge of blindness. ‘Whisky Galore’ is an unashamed celebration of alcoholism: the magic liquor greases the social machinery, gets communities communicating, even cures a bedridden geriatric of all that ails him. But it’s also a celebration of bloody-minded Britishness (or at least Scottishness) and the rebel spirit which, according to Ealing, showed Gerry what for. TH

66.  Wonderland (1999)

Director Michael Winterbottom Cast Gina McKee, Shirley Henderson, Molly Parker, John Simm Now into his sixties and with a brimming CV to his name, Michael Winterbottom has three films on our list – as probably befits such a gifted stalwart of British cinema and TV. This is the  versatile, Blackburn-born director’s highest-placed film, which may have something to do with just how real and recognisable Winterbottom and writer Laurence Coriat’s vision of London is as he tells of one Bonfire Night weekend in the lives of three variously troubled sisters, played by Gina McKee, Shirley Henderson and Molly Parker. The relationships and events amount to a credible portrait of modern city and family life, but it’s the intimate, improvised shooting style (16mm, natural light, all on location) and Michael Nyman’s evocative, memorable score (this often feels like a film made to music) that define this British movie and give it the sense of immediacy and compassion that make it so enduring. DC

65.  Dracula (1958)

Director Terence Fisher Cast Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Michael Gough Hammer stalwart Fisher delivered this rum and rather gory (for the time) take on Bram Stoker’s horror classic of the battle of wills between a devilish, blood-sucking Transylvanian count and his bookish slayer. It helps that Peter Cushing as Van Helsing and Christopher Lee as Dracula are both on top scenery (and in the case of Lee, neck) chewing form, while you also watch in amazement at how they managed to make such a lavish film on the near-pittance of £81,000. Of course, you can titter at the gothic excess of the production design, how po-faced the whole enterprise is (with its lithe hotties darting around in lace negligees) and the cheapo effects, but the subtext of the story about the tragedy of addiction and the transmission of disease remains deadly serious. DJ

Buy, rent or watch ‘Dracula’

64.  Topsy-Turvy (1999)

Director Mike Leigh Cast Jim Broadbent, Allan Corduner, Timothy Spall Notwithstanding ‘ Naked ’ and the second half of ‘ Another Year ’, Mike Leigh’s in some ways most atypical film – it’s a period drama, with song and dance, and rather longer than usual – is also his finest. About Gilbert and Sullivan responding to withering criticism of ‘Princess Ida’ by making a comeback with ‘The Mikado’, it’s the kind of film that perhaps shouldn’t work but does – magnificently, thanks to a clutch of great performances and unshowy but precise direction, which ensures the movie succeeds on three levels: as an illuminating, partly self-reflexive meditation on the creative process; as an unusually vivid insight into just how different the world was as recently as the 1880s (all that wariness of the newfangled telephone!); and as witty, touching, utterly engrossing entertainment. GA

Buy, rent or watch ‘Topsy-Turvy’

63.  Nuts In May (1979)

Director Mike Leigh Cast Roger Sloman, Alison Steadman Judging by its surprise inclusion in this poll of British movies, this second episode in Mike Leigh’s ‘Play for Today’ TV series has remained one of the director’s most fondly remembered early features. Originally broadcast in 1976, it centres on a Dorset camping trip embarked upon by bearded, anally retentive and suffocatingly authoritarian husband Keith (Roger Sloman) and his hippy-drippy, plain-Jane wife Candice-Marie (Leigh’s ex-wife Alison Steadman). Leigh’s crafty powers of societal observation are very much to the fore as we witness a gradual breakdown in relations between middle-class Keith and a noisy young fellow camper who refuses to turn his radio off. That Candice-Marie appears to be showing sympathy towards the other party only serves to inflame the situation… It’s a film of so many memorable moments – from Keith’s cringeworthy grovelling when a policeman questions the roadworthiness of his beloved Morris Minor to Candice-Marie’s hilariously lispy vegetarian folk song. DA

Buy, rent or watch ‘Nuts In May’

62.  Deep End (1970)

Director Jerzy Skolimowski Cast Jane Asher, John Moulder-Brown, Diana Dors One of the all-time great London movies, the splendidly sleazy ‘Deep End’ definitively proves that it takes an outsider’s eye to really capture the true textures of a city. Written and directed by Polish filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski (who cut his teeth co-writing Polanski’s masterful debut ‘ Knife in the Water ’), the film captures the sexual shenanigans of the staff and clientele of a squalid South London swimming bath. Naive teen Mike (John Moulder-Brown) is the new kid, and – amid much inappropriate bum-pinching and his near-rape by regular bather Diana Dors (who else?!) – he falls madly in love with his coquettish manager Susan (a stone-cold tour de force from Jane Asher – who else?). But from its ‘Carry On’-ish opening, the film morphs into something much more sinister, even segueing into ‘ Peeping Tom ’ territory, as Mike’s love turns to violent fixation. Plus, its ultra-seedy depiction of Soho nightlife is the sort of thing you might find nowadays in a Gaspar Noé movie. DJ

61.  Walkabout (1971)

Director Nicolas Roeg Cast Jenny Agutter, David Gulpilil, Lucien John As reported in the terrific 2008 Ozsploitation doc ‘ Not Quite Hollywood ’, Australian cinema in the late ’60s was non-existent. You can argue the importance of tax breaks, TV training and the burgeoning counterculture, but it’s hard not to see Roeg’s haunting Outback tragedy as a breakthrough moment. Other directors, notably Peter Weir, would refine what would come to be known as the landscape movie, but few would capture the desolate wilderness on every Aussie’s doorstep more convincingly. Remembered chiefly for Jenny Agutter’s borderline inappropriate only-just-of-age nude swim, ‘Walkabout’ possesses innumerable charms, not least David Gulpilil’s heartbreaking performance, an astonishing opening scene and of course Roeg’s ravishing photography. TH

60-51 Best British Movies

60.  The Long Good Friday (1980)

Director John Mackenzie Cast Bob Hoskins, Helen Mirren, Derek Thompson   That electro-synth score! Bob Hoskins wandering in close-up through Heathrow! The Docklands as the future! And the actor Derek Thompson, whose movie career was stalled by 25 years of playing Charlie in ‘Casualty’! Some of it might look like old episodes of ‘Dempsey & Makepeace’, but John Mackenzie’s gangster thriller still has great energy and momentum and isn’t a patch on recent pretenders to its throne. In retrospect, it’s the location shooting, especially around the docks – post-industry but pre-development – that resonates the most, as well as writer Barrie Keefe’s capturing of the Thatcherite zeitgeist in the person of gangster Harry Shand (Hoskins), who declares ‘I’m not a politician: I’m a businessman with a sense of history, and I’m also a Londoner’ from the back of a yacht cruising under Tower Bridge. Shand’s criminal network and its involvement with the Mafia and the IRA aren’t at all believable, but Keefe’s portrait of corruption and racism among white males in the underworld, police and local government certainly is. DC

Buy, rent or watch ‘The Long Good Friday’

59.  Blackmail (1929)

Director Alfred Hitchcock Cast Anny Ondra, Sara Allgood, John Longden Which film do you want? The silent version or the more familiar, partly reshot movie that was Britain’s first talkie feature? It doesn’t matter that much, really, since the stylish, occasionally Langian visuals already present in the first cut are still there in the second one, though it’s fascinating to hear Hitchcock’s engagingly experimental, at times even playful approach to sound echoing the elements of expressionism to be found in some of the imagery: the scene in which Anny Ondra’s heroine, having recently stabbed a lecher in self-defence, listens in to a conversation (somewhat improbably) full of references to knives is rightly famous. But, as Tony Rayns has argued, it’s also of interest for its intriguing narrative structure, shifting from a straightforward, rather detached police procedural to something altogether more intimate and messily involving, while the set pieces also display the level of expertise Hitchcock had attained during the silent era as a manipulator of audience emotions and a showman entertainer: the British Museum climax remains a classic sequence. GA

58.  Gregory's Girl (1981)

Director Bill Forsyth Cast John Gordon Sinclair, Dee Hepburn, Claire Grogan

Of all the British filmmakers who, flush with the success of their first few homegrown efforts, decided to go and seek their fortunes across the pond, the tale of Bill Forsyth is the most cautionary. Forsyth’s first ‘proper’ feature following the youth-theatre experiment ‘That Sinking Feeling’, ‘Gregory’s Girl’ is as flawless an example of personal cinema as this nation has to offer: witty, insightful, beautifully observed and heartbreakingly accurate, it says everything there is to say about suburban lust, adolescent romance, the pressure to fit in – truly, all of teenage life is here. The dialogue is poetic but wholly believable, the cast is note-perfect, the characterisation is broad but distinctive and the photography is simple, unfussy and real. None of which made a blind bit of difference when Forsyth tried to take Hollywood by storm and found himself on the sharp end of studio recuts with his career-ending four-year folly ‘ Being Human ’. Ignominious doesn’t begin to cover it.  TH

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57.  2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

• Science fiction

Director Stanley Kubrick Cast Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester

Okay, so the director, money and most of the cast are American, but it was shot here, dammit, so we’re claiming ‘2001’ as our own. True, the same could go for most of Hollywood’s bigger-budget ’70s and early ’80s efforts (‘Star Wars’, ‘Raiders’, ‘Aliens’…), but none of those films feel remotely British whereas, in a strange way, ‘2001’ does. Perhaps it’s the fact that Kubrick had, by this point, become an honorary Englishman, or the influence of co-writer Arthur C Clarke (himself, ironically, an ex-pat). Perhaps it’s the fact that the groundbreaking effects were, to a large extent, designed and built by British crews, or simply that the film feels so resolutely un-Hollywood in tone, structure and impact. Personally, I attribute the film’s Britishness to the roughly three-minute appearance of Leonard Rossiter: even though he’s supposedly playing a Russian scientist, with Rigsby’s arrival it feels like a little piece of northern suburbia has been transplanted to earth’s orbit.  TH

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56.  Caravaggio (1986)

• Documentaries

Director Derek Jarman Cast Nigel Terry, Sean Bean, Tilda Swinton

The late Derek Jarman took the same anachronistic liberties in depicting the life of his subject – Italian, seventeenth-century painter Caravaggio – as the painter himself did with his subjects. Little-known actor Nigel Terry is great as the violently impulsive title character, and the film comprises flashbacks over his life as he lies dying. Specific focus is given to his fraught relationships with two of his models: Sean Bean’s muscular Ranuccio Thomasoni and Tilda Swinton’s Lena. But this is no cut-and-dried biopic, as Jarman frames the drama within ornate tableaux and honours the complexity of the emotions by reining in the melodrama and telling the story through the stresses of his camera and glances of the actors. As you’d expect from a film about a painter, it’s a visual marvel made from very spare ingredients and with the help of a discerning and intelligent director.  DJ

55.  Radio On (1980)

Director Chris Petit Cast David Beames, Lisa Kreuzer, Sandy Ratcliff

Few British movie debuts come as distinctive – or as quietly influential – as former Time Out Film editor Chris Petit’s Europhile mission statement. Not quite a road movie – England’s not large enough – Petit’s film takes the aesthetic and social imperatives of Wim Wenders’s luminous monochrome and his continental enquiries, transplanting them to the fields and motorways of southern England. A nominal plot – the strange death of a brother in Bristol – prompts a journey west from London into a place beyond narrative cinema. Utterly cinematic, powered by a startlingly resonant late ’70s soundtrack (with Bowie’s ‘Heroes’ the ironic turntable centre) and with an acute sense of transformative hybrid landscapes as equal players in the film’s unfolding sensibility, ‘Radio On’ sits, quite literally, on the precipice between a failing post-war reality and the coming abyss of Thatcherism. More relevant than ever, Petit’s essay on existential enquiry in an English setting remains critical viewing.  GE

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54.  Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1974)

Directors Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones Cast Graham Chapman, Michael Palin, John Cleese, Eric Idle et al

It’s a miracle this British movie got off the ground. According to interviews given on the most recent DVD release, the production of the Pythons’ first properly scripted feature was not only dogged by differences between its co-directors Terry Gilliam (who was more interested in camera positions and framing) and Terry Jones (who felt they should focus more on performances) but also by Graham Chapman’s alcoholism – he played most of his parts under the influence. But none of this matters one jot: an absurd and very loose conjoining of the Arthurian and Holy Grail legends, the film remains one of the Pythons’ most memorable piss-takes. Soused or not, Chapman is superb in his tailor-made role of a slightly effeminate King Arthur, and who could forget John Cleese’s neatly carved Black Knight (‘It’s just a flesh wound’) or his similarly hilarious abusive French guard (‘You don’t frighten us, English pig-dogs. Go and boil your bottoms, you sons of a silly person’)? Priceless.  DA

53.  This Sporting Life (1963)

Director Lindsay Anderson Cast Richard Harris, Rachel Roberts

In Lindsay Anderson’s first feature film, Richard Harris grimaces and bellows as a miner hired by his local rugby team and condescended to by the club’s management while juggling a difficult home life as the tenant of a widow and single mother. The film didn’t emerge from Tony Richardson and John Osborne’s Woodfall Films, which produced ‘ Saturday Night and Sunday Morning ’, ‘ A Taste of Honey ’ and ‘ The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner ’, but it was very much part of the same movement of filmmakers coming to drama from documentaries and theatre, and looking to represent the lives of young working-class men and women more truthfully. There’s been a backlash against these British movies in recent years (partly levelled at the public school, Oxbridge provenance of the filmmakers), but the fact that most of them ride high on this list suggests they’re still credited with initiating a new age of storytelling in British cinema, both in terms of the range, social and geographical, of subjects and a style of filmmaking that honours realism above all else.  DC

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52.  Robinson In Space (1997)

Director Patrick Keiller Cast Paul Scofield (voice)

The late actor Paul Scofield returned to lend his acerbic narration to the middle chapter of Patrick Keiller’s singular ‘Robinson’ trilogy, which began in 1994 with ‘ London ’ and was completed recently with ‘ Robinson in Ruins ’. Static, wittily composed images (vaguely reminiscent of the photography of Martin Parr) of buildings and places of natural interest are harmonised with quotations, music and discourse. Here, the dangerously inquisitive Robinson has been tasked with solving the ‘problem of England’ and takes that as his cue to circumnavigate these hallowed isles and pontificate to his heart’s content. As with ‘London’, Keiller’s Daniel Defoe-inspired script seeks to investigate the social, political and economic present by looking back at the historical and literary origins of numerous venues, which mostly include factories, dockyards and, of course, pubs. It’s ruthlessly intelligent stuff, and the conclusions are strangely prophetic.  DJ

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51.  Local Hero (1983)

Director Bill Forsyth Cast Burt Lancaster, Peter Riegert, Denis Lawson

Cockle-warming comedy can be a tough sell in serious film circles – note that ‘ The Ladykillers ’ and ‘ Kind Hearts and Coronets ’ made this list while the likes of ‘ Passport to Pimlico ’, ‘ The Full Monty ’ and ‘Billy Elliot ’ are nowhere to be found. But there remains a small handful of crowd-pleasers guaranteed to tickle the toes of the most hardened cynic, and ‘Local Hero’ is a prime example. Taking his inspiration from Powell and Pressburger, notably ‘ I Know Where I’m Going! ’ (see no. 26), Forsyth built on the goodwill engendered by ‘Gregory’s Girl’ to craft another tale of life’s better possibilities, not overlooking the chance of disappointment but refusing to submit to easy cynicism. The result is richly emotional without ever spilling into outright schmaltz (well, hardly ever), as what could have been a slushy tale of hugging, learning and growing is tempered with healthy (and often hilarious) sarcasm and a deep understanding of humanity’s capacity for goodness.  TH

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50-41 Best British Movies

50.  Culloden (1964)

Director Peter Watkins Cast George McBean, Alan Pope, the people of Inverness

Produced as a softer option after the BBC thought his blunt atomic-age satire ‘ The War Game ’ too harrowing by half, Peter Watkins’s remarkable reproduction of the 1746 Battle of Culloden stands up as a true one-off of both TV and cinema. Initially coming across like a documentary of your average Sealed Knot weekender, the film delivers a minutely detailed chronicle of the battle via the ingenious method of modern TV news reporting: only the rank odour of the battlefield itself is missing. Grunts from both sides sound off directly to camera, political intrigues are speculated upon by the anchor, and we even get to witness the hordes of malnourished Jacobite rebels being torn apart by the power of the English musket. What’s even more interesting is that Watkins chooses to trace the legacy of the battle, patiently observing as the English army wade across the Highlands slaughtering women and children in the name of communal cleansing and retaining the authority of the British monarchy. It all looks scarily familiar.  DJ

49.  The Souvenir (2019)

Director Joanna Hogg The first in a two-part cinematic memoir of rare emotional precision and ambition, Joanna Hogg’s ‘The Souvenir’ tells the semi-autobiographical story of a wannabe filmmaker’s (Honor Swinton Byrne) painful journey through film school and a toxic relationship. A snapshot of London life in Thatcher’s ’80s, it conveys both the airless suffocation of class privilege and the weightless joy of creativity through the eyes of a young woman still learning her own heart. And whether as a coming-of-age drama, a haunting love story, a filmmaking odyssey or simply a time capsule back to an era when everyone wore bad suits and smoked too much, it’s nothing short of a masterpiece.

48.  Gallivant (1996)

Director Andrew Kötting Cast Andrew Kötting, Eden Kötting, Gladys Morris

The incomparable Andrew Kötting – artist, filmmaker, performer – took his eight-year-old daughter Eden and 80-something grandma Gladys on a tour of the British coastline for this anarchic travelogue which turns out to be both a snapshot of the country and a self-portrait of this unlikely trio on an equally unlikely adventure. Kötting’s highly original methods of storytelling mean that ‘Gallivant’ looks nothing like most docs: he mixes formats, throws in archive footage and has much fun with the sound and picture edit. ‘He’s being silly, isn’t he? As daft as they make them,’ says Gladys of her grandson as he swims fully clothed somewhere off the coast of Scotland, having put behind them Sussex, Devon, Cornwall, Wales and the various, illuminating personalities they meet on the road. It’s rare that experimental filmmaking is this humane and enjoyable. The unique result is a work that is both formally radical and eminently accessible and entertaining.  DC

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47.  Hunger (2008)

Director Steve McQueen Cast Michael Fassbender, Liam Cunningham

About as raw and unshakeable as historical dramas get, Steve McQueen’s first feature film is based on the six-week hunger strike conducted by IRA member Bobby Sands at Northern Ireland’s Maze Prison, an ordeal the artist-filmmaker had been obsessed with since childhood. McQueen immersed himself in literature about Sands’ five-year 'no wash protest', and the film presents life in the prison with detailed, near-documentary-style realism. Similarly, Michael Fassbender goes above and beyond to play Sands, dropping 40 pounds to make an already harrowing performance even more searing. It’s a remarkably assured debut for McQueen – see the unbroken, 17-minute single take between Fassbender and Liam Cunningham as a priest trying to convince him to end his strike. He’d go on to make even better films, but none quite so powerful. MS  

46.  Blow-Up (1966)

Director Michelangelo Antonioni Cast David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave, Paul Bowles

‘Blow-Up’ sees swinging London transformed into a sprawling, alienating crime scene where brusque Notting Hill, ahem, ‘fashion’ photographer Thomas (David Hemmings) believes that while idly snapping away in a South London park, he’s captured a homicide in mid-flow. Antonioni’s attitude towards the hippy-dippy cultural revolution taking place in the city during the 1960s is ambivalent at best. When he takes us on a detour through a Yardbirds gig, it’s left to us to decide whether we’re in heaven or in hell. Yet, his film has a more cynical edge than only being about the sensations of a city. As Thomas’s grasp on his investigation becomes more tenuous, Antonioni twists his film to be about the nature of making, collecting and editing images, also suggesting that – try as we might – life is a first-hand experience that no camera can ever really capture. And to sate the cabaret set, it’s all topped off with some mimed tennis. Splendido!  DJ

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45.  The Fallen Idol (1948)

Director Carol Reed Cast Ralph Richardson, Michèle Morgan, Bobby Henrey

Given his reputation as a novelist, it’s easy to forget how major a force Graham Greene became in post-war British cinema, and how many key aspects of national life became cemented in the public consciousness as a result of his extraordinary run of work between ‘ Confidential Agent ’ in 1945 and ‘ Our Man in Havana ’ in 1959. ‘The Fallen Idol’ is primarily a film about class, which even then was nothing new. But it’s Greene’s approach to his topic which sets the film apart: by viewing the social hierarchy through a child’s eyes, the author allows us to view the matter afresh, an approach which would bear fruit again in films as diverse as ‘ The Spanish Gardener ’, ‘ The Go-Between ’ and ‘ Atonement ’. But ‘The Fallen Idol’ is the best of the bunch, and indeed one of the finest British movies about children, about the ways they can be manipulated and betrayed, their loyalties misplaced and their emotions toyed with.  TH

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44.  Repulsion (1965)

Director Roman Polanski Cast Catherine Deneuve, Yvonne Furneaux

Emeric Pressburger, Karel Reisz, Joseph Losey, Stanley Kubrick… This list isn’t short of writers and directors who brought an outsider’s sensibility to British movies. The young Polish filmmaker Roman Polanski came to London to make his second film – and first in English – and cast 21-year-old Catherine Deneuve as Carole, a fragile young Belgian woman living in South Kensington with her sister and working in a local hairdressing salon. When her sibling goes away for a few days with a boyfriend, Carole’s nervousness and discomfort with men descends into full-blown paranoia, illustrated subtly by Polanski with sparing but sinister visual tricks such as cracking plaster and even hands emerging from walls. The film remains influential on both horror directors and those looking to represent mental breakdown on film (look at Darren Aronofsky’s ‘ Black Swan ’).  DC

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43.  Sabotage (1936)

Director Alfred Hitchcock Cast Oscar Homolka, Sylvia Sidney, John Loder

‘Sand! Sabotage! Deliberate! Wrecking!’ are the terse first words of Hitchcock’s atmospheric, exciting and sometimes funny, 1936 London-based suspenser, adapted from Joseph Conrad’s ‘The Secret Agent’. This tale of a bomber and saboteur (Oscar Homolka) whose terrorist activities lead his young wife (Sylvia Sidney) and brother into tragedy is full of the master’s touches. It’s moodily rendered with expressionist-tinged chiaroscuro photography by Hitchcock’s regular cameraman of the 1930s, Bernard Knowles, and was subject to a stinging review by long-time doyen of British critical circles, CA Lejeune. ‘I committed a grave error in having the bomb go off. Never repeated it!’, Hitch told the BBC in 1964. But that choice, augmented by the extraordinary and moving study in lonely isolation offered by Homolka as Verloc, helps provide the film with a stature and depth that not only impressed Hitchcock champions and  Cahiers du Cinéma  critics Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol in the 1950s, but ensures its place today as the third most favourite Hitchcock film in our poll.  WH

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42.  Fires Were Started (1941)

Director Humphrey Jennings

The documentary-maker Humphrey Jennings has been well remembered in recent years, first with a film in 2002 by Kevin Macdonald and then in 2004 with a biography by Kevin Jackson – which might explain the placing of this and his stirring ‘Listen to Britain’, both wartime films, so high on our list. A leading light of the GPO and Crown Film Units and a founder of Mass Observation, Jennings was responsible for so many of our received images of Britain during World War II. For ‘Fires Were Started’, he filmed firemen in London’s East End but devised characters for them and showed them during both the peace of day and the struggle of fighting a major fire in the docks at night. His film is a celebration of heroism, a lament for lives lost and a stoical expression of the necessary wartime maxim that life must go on. Yes, it’s propaganda – but what humane, artful propaganda it is.  DC

41.  Witchfinder General (1968)

Director Michael Reeves Cast Vincent Price, Patrick Wymark, Ian Ogilvy

The quaint English countryside acts as the backdrop for much enthusiastic sadism in this Civil War tale based very loosely on the life of Protestant zealot Matthew Hopkins and his reign of witch-burning terror in East Anglia’s badlands. While we can only imagine the pleasure of watching original choice Donald Pleasance as the sexually repressed misogynist Hopkins, Vincent Price makes a horribly effective substitute, lisping biblical lore to the screams of his victims on the rack and at the stake. The real star, though, is the textured, bleak cinematography of John Colquillon (who later shot ‘ Straw Dogs ’), which lends an eerie, tripped-out detachment to the pitiless violence and casts the landscape as a timeless witness to casual horror. Despite its camp reputation, ‘Witchfinder’ is grimmer and more effective than many of its costumed contemporaries and fully deserved both the revulsion it attracted at its initial release and the rehabilitation as a classic it has enjoyed since.  PF

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40-31 Best British Movies

40.  Ratcatcher (1999)

Director Lynne Ramsay Cast William Eadie, Tommy Flanagan, Mandy Matthews

As debut features go, this one rubs shoulders with the likes of Terrence Malick’s ‘ Badlands ’, Charles Burnett’s ‘ Killer of Sheep ’ and Terence Davies’s ‘ Distant Voices, Still Lives ’ for the sublime fluency of its technique and conviction in the belief that a film doesn’t need a beginning, middle and end to be meaningful, dramatic and poetic. Following on from a trio of shorts, director Lynne Ramsay revisited her birthplace of Glasgow to deliver an account of innocence and experience, love and death during a dustmen’s strike in the early 1970s . The pranks of monosyllabic scamp James (William Eadie) form the core of the film, and we eventually learn that James wants nothing more than to abandon the squalor of the city and move to a new housing project next to a cornfield in which he can frolic. Ramsay asks, ‘Do you know where your kids are?’, but she doesn’t forget that it is possible to be socially responsible and artistically audacious at the same time.  DJ

39.  London (1994)

If you didn't know Patrick Keiller's smartly rambling, tricksy walking tour of our city from 1994, you might think that his title was pompous or presumptive. But his film is anything but as he gives us a fictional, unseen narrator, Robinson (voiced by Paul Scofield), who takes us on a tour of London, known and less known, grand and grotty, around the time of the film’s making, taking in such references as the 1992 general election and the IRA bomb at Bishopsgate in 1993. Cinematic psychogeography, you might call it, but that’s a bit, well, pompous for a film that is endlessly self-mocking, witty and perceptive. If only British cinema produced more such films that dance merrily on the border between fact and fiction – but, then, again, Keiller’s film – the first in a trilogy – is so unique in tone that imitators would easily be caught out.  DC

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38.  Went the Day Well? (1942)

Director Alberto Cavalcanti Cast Leslie Banks, Elizabeth Allan, Frank Lawton

What if, right, the Hun were on the cusp of clinching victory in Europe, and all that stood between your average, flat-capped English patriot and the swift introduction of sauerkraut to the national menu was the collective muscle of a close-knit countryside community? Well, that’s ‘Went the Day Well?’ in a nutshell. It’s a droll, Ealing-made World War II propaganda film that also happens to be a ridiculously taut suspense thriller about how the denizens of the fictional Bramley End put aside their differences and foil a Nazi plot to capture Britain, sometimes even sacrificing life and limb by diving on live grenades and going on ad hoc axe rampages. And if that isn’t enough, it also contains the single greatest dialogue exchange in this entire list, as the well-to-do Mrs Fraser asks Cockney urchin George, ‘Do you know what morale is?’ to which he replies, ‘Yeah, it’s summink what the wops ain’t got.’  DJ

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37.  It Always Rains on Sunday (1947)

Director Robert Hamer Cast Googie Withers, Edward Chapman, John McCallum

You’ll find Robert Hamer’s ‘ Kind Hearts and Coronets ’, also from Ealing Studios, higher up our list, but two years earlier he made this lesser-known gem which manages to pull off the trick of being both a credible snapshot of post-war East End life and an effective noir thriller as it unfolds over one Sunday in 1947. The plot – a Bethnal Green mother and housewife (Googie Withers) hides an on-the-run con and ex-lover (John McCallum) in her busy home – allows us intimate access to a working-class home. We witness its routines, rituals and relationships, while at the same time we’re hooked in by the suspense of the crime element of the story and the threat of a dangerous romance in contrast to the drabness of lives defined by rationing and duties. There’s the odd over-fruity line or performance, but a stunning final night-time chase sequence in a railway depot more than compensates.  DC

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36.  The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962)

Director Tony Richardson Cast Tom Courtenay, James Bolam, Julia Foster

As with its French equivalents, much of the British New Wave looks horribly dated in a modern context: all that light jazz, casual romantic disaffection and overeager jump-cutting doesn’t really wash with contemporary audiences. But what’s beyond criticism is the commitment to emotional veracity which fuelled films like ‘The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner’. So while the timeworn clichés of the kitchen sink remain intact – grubby class warfare, county-hopping pseudo-Northern accents, the God’s-eye shot of ‘our town from that hill’ – the film is anchored in Tom Courtenay’s remarkable, remorseless performance as the eponymous runner Colin, torn between selfishness and sacrifice, class loyalty and commercial gain, impossible victory and inevitable surrender.  TH

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35.  The Servant (1963)

Director Joseph Losey Cast James Fox, Dirk Bogarde, Sarah Miles, Wendy Craig

Two films by the American exile Joseph Losey have made our list, and few would argue that this chilling domestic two-hander from 1963 is his most enduring. It’s Harold Pinter’s tense, subtle script, adapted from a Robin Maugham novel, which gives life to the story of an aristocratic bachelor, Tony (James Fox), who hires a servant, Hugo (Dirk Bogarde), whose machinations, including moving in his girlfriend (masquerading as his sister) as a maid, wear down Tony so that their hierarchical roles blur and mutate. In other hands, this would be a mildly interesting thriller, but Pinter’s sharp characterisations and unspoken suggestions, along with Losey’s full, slavering embrace of the potentials of Tony’s grand Chelsea home, make this a more open, suggestive work, offering ideas to do with class, power and sexuality. The actors are tremendous. For Bogarde, it built on his daring turn in ‘ Victim ’. For Fox, it was a rehearsal for his similarly shape-shifting role in ‘ Performance ’.  DC

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34.  A Clockwork Orange (1971)

Director Stanley Kubrick Cast Malcolm McDowell, Patrick Magee, Michael Bates

Swap Beethoven for heroin, and Stanley Kubrick’s scandalous 1971 Moog-mare based on Anthony Burgess’s novel might work as a forerunner to ‘ Trainspotting ’. It presents the wayward travails of Little Alex (Malcolm McDowell) a tearaway who likes nothing more than a bit of the old ultra-violence. But after a bungled break-in where he is abandoned by his band of cock-nosed droogs, he is packed off to a hospital to be ‘cured’. The style of filmmaking is at once clinically precise and imaginatively loose. This is down to the multitude of tricks that Kubrick hoists in (slo-mo, fast-forward, cartoon inserts, back projection) to encapsulate the total autonomy these characters have and why they see their behaviour as thrilling. The violence is plentiful and invites a mixture of revulsion and amusement, not least because it is usually overlaid by Walter Carlos’s mad reinterpretations of classical standards. Does it stand up psychologically? Probably not. But as an example of a work in which the filmmaking style matches the tone of the material, it’s peerless.  DJ

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33.  Secrets & Lies (1996)

Director Mike Leigh Cast Brenda Blethyn, Timothy Spall, Marianne Jean-Baptiste

‘ Naked ’ proved to many that Mike Leigh was a filmmaker who would continue to surprise well into and beyond his third decade of filmmaking – but ‘Secrets and Lies’ proved the same to everyone else when it won the Palme d’Or and Best Actress prizes at Cannes and was nominated for five Oscars. The story of an adopted, professional black British woman (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) who tracks down her white, working-class birth mother (Brenda Blethyn) came with its own themes and ideas. But it also allowed Leigh to refine interests he had been exploring for years, such as the relationships between parents and kids, the love and antagonism of siblings and our awkward relationships to material wealth. Ultimately, it’s about the power – and destructiveness – of the unspoken, and a climactic barbecue scene, in which Timothy Spall breaks the silence and gives one of the best performances of his career, is both heartbreaking and liberating, for the characters and for us.  DC

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32.  Get Carter (1971)

Director Mike Hodges Cast Michael Caine, Britt Ekland, John Osborne

Its overfamiliar poster, score and lazy stylistic appropriation by glossy lads’ mags may make the very idea of ‘Get Carter’ something of a chore, but once the train starts rolling, there’s simply no getting off. A cold, impossibly grimy film, ‘Get Carter’ is a ‘ Third Man ’ for the three-day week generation that drags you through the sulphurous backrooms of hell. Michael Caine’s frosty Lahndahn gangster uncovers layer upon layer of villainy as he travels to Newcastle to investigate his brother’s death, but the details – and, for many, the plot – are secondary to the air of desperation, squalor and complicity. ‘The greatest decade in the history of mankind is over and… we have failed to paint it black,’ might well have been the mantra in Ladbroke Grove and Camden Town , but ‘Get Carter’ presents the more desolate reality of those for whom the swinging ’60s were something that happened to other people and a grim, forlorn post-war mindset remained the pervading norm.  ALD

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31.  The Lady Vanishes (1938)

Director Alfred Hitchcock Cast Margaret Lockwood, Michael Redgrave

Some argue that Hitchcock made his greatest works in the US, but the presence of four of his British movies on our list suggests that not everybody holds that view – or at least that his earlier work is still held in very high regard. ‘The Lady Vanishes’ builds on the mysterious, on-the-run mood of the earlier, more well-known ‘ The 39 Steps ’ (1935), but its 1938 date, mittel-European setting on a train from an Alpine location and well-integrated political nods slyly tie it to debates over appeasement and engagement. That said, it’s first and foremost a suspenseful thriller as a little old lady, Miss Froy, disappears on a train and everyone bar a young man and woman (Michael Redgrave and Margaret Lockwood) proceed to deny she exists. It’s very funny, and it's ridiculous but masterly twists and turns are made doubly fun by a colourful cast of characters including a nun, a surgeon and a pair of cricket-loving bounders.  DC

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30-21 Best British Movies

30.  The Ladykillers (1955)

Director Alexander Mackendrick Cast Alec Guinness, Peter Sellers, Katie Johnson

Small wonder this classic Ealing crime caper remains a mainstay of so many film polls. The casting and performances, for a start, are brilliantly sharp. As is Ealing writer William Rose’s finely wrought script: five caricatured criminals (Alec Guinness, Peter Sellers, Herbert Lom, Cecil Parker and Danny Green) masquerading as a group of classical musicians arrive at the King’s Cross home of a dear little old lady (Katie Johnson, who won a Bafta for her pitch-perfect performance) and enquire whether they might rent a few rooms – while they surreptitiously plot an audacious railway robbery. The set-up paves the way for a wonderful series of amusing dialogues between the old biddy and the ‘quintet’ whose pretence she never twigs until the final comically violent frames. Guinness and Lom are the standouts; both look as if they’d strayed in from a Hammer production. Unforgettable.  DA

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29.  Peeping Tom (1960)

Director Michael Powell Cast Karl Böhm, Anna Massey, Maxine Audley

Michael Powell stabbed so Alfred Hitchcock could slash. Released months prior to Psycho , this Technicolor horror show traversed similarly transgressive terrain, following the exploits of a serial killer who murders women using a dagger affixed to the end of a camera, and in some ways primed audiences for the audacities Hitch was about to unleash on the world. Another way to look at it is that Powell took the fall. While Psycho further burnished Hitchcock’s legend, Peeping Tom just about ruined Powell’s reputation; he never made another film in Britain. It would take decades for the movie to get its due as a taboo-smashing piece of psychological horror – but as an indictment of a voyeuristic society, its prescience has only grown in the internet age. MS    

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28.  The Wicker Man (1973)

Director Robin Hardy Cast Edward Woodward, Christopher Lee, Britt Ekland

The pagan folk revival of the late 1960s and early ’70s was easy to express in music: all you needed was a cape, beard, acoustic guitar and a crumhorn player in winklepickers. In film, it was a different matter: what sane production company was likely to shell out thousands for tales of earth-worship and mystic rites, especially when the target audience was a) notoriously cash-strapped and b) largely confined to rambling country cottages miles from the nearest picture palace? To be fair, Robin Hardy did his best to make ‘The Wicker Man’ a commercial prospect, roping in Hammer legends Christopher Lee and Ingrid Pitt, TV icon Edward Woodward and tabloid eye candy Britt Ekland to help pull in the punters. That the resulting film was still compulsively weird, highly atmospheric and a total financial disaster is a testament to Hardy’s misjudgment of the marketplace. That its rediscovery continues to gather pace almost four decades later is a testament to his skill as a filmmaker.  TH

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27.  Bill Douglas Trilogy: My Childhood (1972), My Ain Folk (1973) and My Way Home (1978)

Director Bill Douglas Cast Stephen Archibald, Hughie Restorick, Jean Taylor-Smith

It would be easy to dismiss ‘My Childhood’ (1972), ‘My Ain Folk’ (1973) and ‘My Way Home’ (1978) – the trilogy of short-ish films made by the late Scottish director Bill Douglas – as textbook examples of the glum social realism that so often besmirches the name of British cinema. These films capture a rare poetry in their depiction of wayward youth, the death of industry and the small, diligent ways in which the downtrodden are able to retain hope and ward off constant darkness. Set during the 1940s in Douglas’s own birthplace (the dead-end mining town of Newcraighall) the emotional focal point of these films is Jamie (Stephen Archibald), an inquisitive, defensive young scamp whose day-to-day existence is a fight for survival and friendship. Filmed with great care and precision in piercing monochrome and with barely any dialogue to drown out the intense expressiveness of the people and the landscapes captured on camera, Douglas has often been cited as Britain’s answer to France’s Robert Bresson. It’s an accolade that makes total sense.  DJ

26.  I Know Where I'm Going! (1945)

Directors Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger Cast Wendy Hiller, Roger Livesey

‘Will you do something for me before I go away? I want you to kiss me!’ It might be Joan Webster’s (Wendy Hiller) first unplanned move in all of Powell and Pressburger’s film, a witty and characteristically eccentric romance filmed largely in the Western Isles of Scotland about a headstrong young woman who heads north from London to a remote island to marry a wealthy man she barely knows. It’s not just a physical journey for Joan, but a spiritual one, as P&P maroon their heroine on a neighbouring island where she must wait until the weather dies down before continuing her trip. By the time Joan is battling a storm and a whirlpool in a tiny boat, her ‘heart of stone’, as one islander calls it, is finally cracking and she’s woken up to a less material and more honest world represented by the Scottish folk – including Roger Livesey’s local sailor – she meets, a world the filmmakers are happy to celebrate in a fashion that’s unsentimental but still stirring.  DC

25.  Great Expectations (1946)

Director David Lean Cast John Mills, Valerie Hobson, Martita Hunt

The chocolate-box social politics and borderline anti-semitism of David Lean’s other Dickens adaptation ‘Oliver Twist’ hasn’t worn so well in the new millennium, but there are no such drawbacks with ‘Great Expectations’. This is a film so deeply ingrained in the national psyche and so widely referenced in popular culture that seeing it for the first time feels like a nostalgic experience, albeit a slightly discomfiting one: for all the film’s rosy-cheeked, aspirational cheer, the dark undercurrents of the novel are never ignored. The way Lean weaves elements of Universal horror and film noir into his depiction of nineteenth-century London is breathtaking, and his treatment of Miss Havisham as a giant time-ravaged spider-queen wrapped in a crumbling web of dust and rotting lace finds unexpected echoes in everything from ‘ Psycho ’ to ‘ Aliens ’.  TH

Buy, rent or watch ‘Great Expectations’

24.  Brazil (1985)

Director Terry Gilliam Cast Jonathan Pryce, Robert De Niro, Katherine Helmond

Thank God for Universal Studios. Not only did they finance Terry Gilliam’s one and only undisputed masterpiece, but thanks to the machinations of short-sighted studio supremo Sid Sheinberg, who ordered a re-cut, they managed to ensure that ‘Brazil’ became a critical cause célèbre and cult classic, with Gilliam the poster child for the battle between art and commerce. The film would have endured either way, but its abject failure might have brought Gilliam’s career to a juddering halt sooner than it otherwise did. Grim, confusing and scattergun it may be, but ‘Brazil’ is a film rich in deep and diverse pleasures, many of them uniquely British: Jonathan Pryce’s nervy, utterly isolated performance, cameos from the likes of Ian Holm, Bob Hoskins, Jim Broadbent, Michael Palin, Simon Jones and Gordon Kaye, the oppressively beautiful, wholly London-ish architecture, and a pervasive, post-war, proletarian sense of utter helplessness and bureaucratic desperation from which the only escape is sweet oblivion.  TH

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23.  Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

Director David Lean Cast Peter O’Toole, Omar Sharif, Alec Guinness

At the time of its release in 1962, David Lean’s desert epic dwarfed the oppostition both in length (228 minutes) and breadth. But what is it about this particular film that springs mostly to mind when composing, from memory alone, one’s favourite list of British movies? There’s the exoticism of its unique Saharan locations; Maurice Jarre’s stirringly melodious string-laden score; and, above all, the undeniable quality of Freddie Young’s cinematography. Indeed, that single shot of Omar Sharif’s extraordinarily slow emergence through the distant haze of the desert sun remains one of cinema’s singularly most striking and iconic moments. And you’ve got to hand it to Peter O’Toole; he plays the role of TE Lawrence – a British Army liaison officer during the Arab v Turkish revolt of 1916 – with gusto.  DA

Buy, rent or watch ‘Lawrence of Arabia’

22.  Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960)

Director Karel Reisz Cast Albert Finney, Rachel Roberts, Shirley Anne Field

This is a man’s world

Forging the template for films about swarthy, unreconstructed men whose only solace can be found in the bottom of a pint glass, Karel Reisz’s raucous and relevant 1960 character study showed the lengths that the young, disenfranchised working-class stiff would go to shirk the responsibilities of adulthood. Based on the first novel by ‘Angry Young Man’ author Alan Sillitoe, (who also wrote ‘ The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner ’), the film gave Albert Finney his big break as the hard-drinking, hard-smoking and hard-loving Arthur Seaton, a nihilistic machine worker in Nottingham who habitually funnels his modest wage packet on pleasures of the flesh. Finney’s all-pistons-firing lead performance is note-perfect, and props still go to him for making us empathise with Arthur’s naivety rather than being alienated by his bravado and the fact that he’s, well, a bit of a shit. Makes a lovely double with ‘ Billy Liar ’, only Billy never got duffed up by squaddies. Alas…  DJ

Buy, rent or watch ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’

21.  Nil by Mouth (1997)

Director Gary Oldman Cast Kathy Burke, Ray Winstone

What a pity Gary Oldman has never been able to fulfil his dream of following up this, his directorial debut! However fine many of his performances had been, both the writing and the direction of this deservedly acclaimed British movie displayed considerably more than great promise. ‘Nil by Mouth’ remains, even now, one of the most painfully honest and eloquent studies of a kind of London working-class life. Often erroneously described as ‘autobiographical’, the film’s astute portrait of macho violence, alcoholic excess, drug addiction and petty criminality nevertheless benefitted from Oldman’s proximity to such behaviour in his early years, and that, coupled with a style partly inspired by Cassavetes, makes for a movie as riveting in its raw, nocturnal ‘realism’ as it is unsentimental in its humanity and dark humour. It won Kathy Burke a Cannes prize, revived Ray Winstone’s fortunes and kickstarted the acting career of the director’s sister (under the pseudonym of Laila Morse).  GA

20-11 Best British Movies

20.  Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979)

Director Terry Jones Cast Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Michael Palin, Eric Idle et al

One of the strangest but most welcome side effects of great comedy is the way it crystallises ideas, bringing concepts previously vague and inexpressible into the public consciousness. How long into a chat about the splintering of political pressure groups before someone mentions the People’s Front of Judea? When talking about the impossibility of a successful military occupation, how long before someone mentions what the Romans did for us? When discussing religion in general, and cults in particular, how long before someone pipes up, ‘Yes, we’re all individuals?' The controversy may have faded, but three decades on, ‘Life of Brian’ still dominates our perceptions of organised religion (and organised resistance) and their many obfuscations, untruths and double standards in a way that is not just remarkable, but extremely heartwarming.  TH

19.  Barry Lyndon (1975)

Director Stanley Kubrick Cast Ryan O'Neal, Marisa Berenson, Patrick Magee

Is it a surprise that Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Barry Lyndon’ (1975) should beat off ‘A Clockwork Orange’ (1971) and ‘2 001: A Space Odyssey ’ (1968) in our poll for the best-loved British Kubrick? The 1976 Academy showered Kubrick’s painstaking, candlelit version of Thackeray’s 1844 novel of a scoundrel Irish soldier’s picaresque adventures with Oscars for Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design and Best Music. Despite those garlands, however, it was a relative failure at the time – notably in the US, albeit a hit with the discerning Parisians – and by the mid-1980s, its reputation had further declined: our own film editor, Chris Peachment, was not alone when he described it as ‘a triumph of technique over any human content’ and ‘an array of waxwork figures against lavish backdrops’. But what technique; what waxworks; and what backdrops there are in this $11million, three-hour epic, shot over an impossible eight months. ‘“Barry Lyndon” is a story which does not depend upon surprise,’ Kubrick told Michel Ciment in one of his rare interviews, nailing the film’s re-found appeal. ‘What is important is not what is going to happen, but how it will happen. I think Thackeray trades off the advantage of surprise to gain a greater sense of inevitability and a better integration of what might otherwise seem melodramatic or contrived.’ Likewise, as time goes by, Kubrick’s own contrivances – the technical obsessions, the outwardly puppet-like performances, Ryan O’Neal’s seemingly endless wanderings, adventures and increasingly futile ambitions – have themselves fallen away to reveal something quite extraordinary: the shape of a life, a human’s rise and fall, rendered as an epic, mesmeric, suffusing slow dance of immersive cinema – and therefore, not only Kubrick’s most beautiful but also his most empathetic and understanding work.  WH

Buy, rent or watch ‘Barry Lyndon’

18.  The Innocents (1961)

Director Jack Clayton Cast Deborah Kerr, Michael Redgrave

This superior ghost story is an adaptation of Henry James’s novella ‘The Turn of the Screw’ that still manages to feel more subtle and inventive than the vast majority of spooky pretenders that came in its wake. The story sees Miss Giddens (Deborah Kerr) become governess to two children who live in a sprawling country pile and are the wards of an absent uncle (Michael Redgrave) who lives in London. As Miss Giddens spots ghosts and becomes convinced of the kids’ malevolence, it’s the ambiguity of both the story and film that impress. Is Miss Giddens mad? Are there ghosts? Are both things true, even? If you list a lot of the film’s more creepy tics – sweet but demonic children; ghostly visions; a music-box score; stuffed animals; a scary attic – they now sound like clichés, but the film still works fantastically well as a supernatural-cum-psychological chiller and most obviously feels like a template for Polanski’s ‘ Repulsion ’, ‘ Rosemary’s Baby ’ and even ‘ The Tenant ’.  DC

17.  A Canterbury Tale (1944)

Directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger Cast Eric Portman, Sheila Sim, John Sweet, Dennis Price

For many, this light-fingered take on Chaucer’s infamous tome will always be Powell and Pressburger’s great work. It’s possibly the film of theirs which touches most poignantly on what it means to live and what it means to be living in England. Amusing, tragic, inquisitive and profoundly poetic, on the surface it’s a World War Two-set shaggy dog story of three unlikely compatriots – a British sergeant, an American GI and a Land Girl – who are thrown together in the sleepy, fictitious town of Chillingbourne which sits on the rail link to Canterbury. No sooner have they disembarked from the train than one of their number is stung by a night-time prowler who’s getting his jollies by putting glue in women’s hair (and no, this isn’t a foresight into ‘ Peeping Tom ’). Their hokey investigation to locate the scoundrel acts as the narrative through-line with which Powell and Pressburger hang a gorgeous, panoramic vision of an England steeped in history, tradition and eccentric, downhome custom. It also takes a comic look at the cultural divisions between America and Britain and the need to bridge that divide for the common good. A heady, almost surreal climax in Canterbury, where the three pals part ways and find comfort in friends, music and memory, is tremendously moving, not least because we also discover the reason why they were all there in the first place.  DJ

Buy, rent or watch ‘A Canterbury Tale’

16.  Black Narcissus (1947)

Directors Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger Cast Deborah Kerr, Sabu, David Farrar

All those prissy critics outraged by Powell’s shift into voyeuristic overkill with ‘ Peeping Tom ’ should have done their homework: from the perverted ‘glue man’ and his ‘sticky stuff’ in ‘ A Canterbury Tale ’ through the abusive, alcoholic anti-romance of ‘ The Small Back Room ’, his films are rife with suppressed deviance and sexual panic, none more so than this unsettling adaptation of Rumer Godden’s nuns-in-peril novel ‘Black Narcissus’. All The Archers’ best work resisted categorisation, and this might be the pinnacle of their tendency for audience-baiting idiosyncracy: set in Darjeeling but shot in West Sussex, the film seems as far out of time as it does out of place, eschewing genre (is it romance? Period drama? Horror? Social satire?) in favour of pure atmosphere and an unparalleled sense of mounting hysteria. Deborah Kerr’s career-best performance is just the icing on the Himalaya.  TH

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15.  Withnail & I (1987)

Director Bruce Robinson Cast Richard E Grant, Paul McGann, Richard Griffiths

Arguably, three years ago writer-director Bruce Robinson’s riotous black comedy – describing the misadventures of two recent ex-students/‘resting’ young actors in an unwelcoming north London – would have pipped ‘ Kind Hearts and Coronets ’ as the highest, rather than the second-highest-rated British comedy in our poll. At that point, the ‘Withnail & I’ fan club was at its bibulous height, with its ardent admirers, word-perfect in Robinson’s semi-autobiographical script, meeting in Camden pubs to swap quotes and play the DVD-extra drinking games (though, more properly, they should have frequented tea shops, demanding ‘the finest wines available to humanity!’). At auction, Withnail’s ragged Harris check coat went to Chris Evans for £8,000 and the leather worn by Marwood – for he is ‘I’ – was bought by Danny Baker. In 2000, Total Film readers voted it the third-best comedy of all time. That said, ‘Withnail & I’ was no instant success: it managed a paltry three-week run on its opening and, including its 2007 UK Film Council remastered re-release, has only grossed £1.5million in British cinemas. Robinson has said the film’s mid-1980s production for Handmade Films almost made him as penurious as his hero: having to provide £30,000 of his own cash to film Richard E Grant and Paul McGann on their fateful trip in their clapped-out Jaguar MK2 to the Lake District. But if, initially, ‘Withnail & I’ was a cult success, built up on video and DVD viewing, our poll shows it now has a solid place in British viewers’ hearts; its inspirationally funny script, spot-on performances and evocative soundtrack helping to combine a gloriously mocking elegy for Britain’s supposedly Swingin’ Sixties with a moving, bittersweet distillation of personal memory and of friendship recalled.  WH

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14.  The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943)

Directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger Cast Roger Livesey, Deborah Kerr

Two things are well known about Powell and Pressburger’s 1943 epic about the life of an old-fashioned ex-army officer serving in the Home Guard during World War II: Churchill disliked the whole idea of it, and may have thought it was about him, and the Blimp character, over-fed and irascible, was inspired by David Low’s cartoon character of the same name in the Evening Standard. The reality is that ‘Colonel Blimp’ is a much more wise, surprising and measured film than either of these things suggest. It’s a film about the unknowability of others, the complexity of lives, the power of time on our character and the influence of history on our behaviour. It has the depth and sweep of a novel, while remaining wonderfully cinematic (think of the duel in Berlin, the snappy montage of animal heads on Blimp’s wall, the desolate battle scenes…). At the time of its release at the height of war, it was also very bold in trying to counter some myths about history and give colour to black-and-white prejudices (not least about Germany and Germans). The trick and power of Powell and Pressburger’s film is that, by first giving us the Blimp we expect – loud, angry, stuck in his ways – and then flashing back and recounting events in his life from 1902 to 1943, including a lifelong friendship with a German officer, a lost love and time spent serving in three wars, they give us an entirely different character: a complex, rounded and sympathetic man. Blimp may not be us, and we may not even like him – but by the end we know and understand him, and that’s the brilliance of Powell and Pressburger’s work.  DC

Buy, rent or watch ‘The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp’

13.  The 39 Steps (1935)

Director Alfred Hitchcock Cast Robert Donat, Madeleine Carroll, Godfrey Tearle

For this writer, Hitchcock’s adaptation of John Buchan’s novel is not only his very finest British movie – for suspense, pace, wit, vivid characterisation, atmosphere and virtuoso set-pieces it even outdoes the brilliant ‘ The Lady Vanishes ’ – but the warmest, most affecting movie of his career. It’s not just that Robert Donat’s Hannay is one of his most sympathetic protagonists (compare him to that other innocent-on-the-run, Cary Grant’s complacent Roger O – ‘for nothing’ – Thornhill in ‘ North by Northwest ’), nor that Donat and Madeleine Carroll, for all their initial sparring, finally make such a lovely couple. No, the entire film is packed with touching moments, from the affectionate depiction of banter between members of the music hall audience at the film’s beginning to the unexpectedly touching moment of Mr Memory’s death at the Palladium, when his brief dialogue with Hannay deftly suggests the men’s mutual respect. In between, there’s the strangely courageous death of the otherwise absurdly exotic female ‘agent’, the cosy, understanding matrimonial love of the Scottish innkeeper for her more innocent husband, and even the steadfast loyalty shown by the villainous Scottish spymaster’s spouse. Most heartbreaking of all, however, are the brief but unforgettable scenes at the crofter’s cottage, where Hannay’s talk of London and perfectly sincere compliments afford the young wife (Peggy Ashcroft) a tantalising glimpse of a far happier life than the one she faces with her mean, brutish husband (John Laurie). These few minutes include some of the subtlest acting to be found in Hitchcock’s oeuvre, not to mention an emotional depth and delicacy he never again quite managed to attain.  GA

Buy, rent or watch ‘The 39 Steps’

12.  Brief Encounter (1945)

Director David Lean Cast Trevor Howard, Celia Johnson

Few British movies divide opinion like ‘Brief Encounter’. Many view the film as cold, heartless, too stiff-lipped to be truly moving (check the current Time Out review by Dave Calhoun for evidence). But without wishing to cause offence to my esteemed colleagues, they’re dead wrong. Because for those willing to chip through the ice-shelf, there’s a raging emotional torrent waiting to sweep them away. And it’s not as though Lean is celebrating these characters’ inability to communicate, to break through their social strictures and live real lives. ‘Brief Encounter’ is a tragedy, not just for two mismatched lovers but for an entire class of people, trapped in empty suburban existences ruled by propriety and that desperate, heartbreaking, terribly British desire to remain anonymous, to avoid offence, to blend in. And therein lies the film’s extraordinary power, because despite the miles and the decades which lie between, that’s still us up there on the screen.  TH

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11.  Naked (1993)

Director Mike Leigh Cast David Thewlis, Lesley Sharp, Karin Cartlidge

From its initial release, it was clear that ‘Naked’, which is Mike Leigh’s highest-ranked film on our chart of best British movies, was destined to appear on lists like this for years to come. And yet, of all the films in the higher echelons of this list, it might be the most flawed and difficult. There are at least three performances in ‘Naked’ – Katrin Cartlidge as the bruised Sophie, Claire Skinner as shrieking Sandra and Greg Cruttwell as vicious yuppie psycho Jeremy – whose tone threatens to derail the film. And yet, despite these wobbles, ‘Naked’ is a masterpiece and perhaps Leigh’s best film to date, or at least the one which most appeals to his sceptics. Certainly, at the time it marked a departure for Leigh into more mythical, less domestic territory, and in retrospect marked a new maturity in his filmmaking. Set in a seedy, strip-lit London populated almost exclusively by predators and prey, this is the one film in which Leigh drops the idea that life is sweet: his characters are mostly either cruel or pathetic, and drifting above them all – or crawling beneath – is David Thewlis’s Johnny, the derisive observer of everyone else’s flaws who can’t bear to deal with his own. A moustachioed Mancunian angel of death with a mouth like a Salford sewer and a mind teeming with useless information, Thewlis guarantees the film’s central place in our cultural pantheon for another century at least.  TH

Top 10 Best British Movies

10.  Trainspotting (1996)

Director Danny Boyle Cast Ewan McGregor, Robert Carlyle, Jonny Lee Miller

At the planning stage of this survey, not a single member of the Time Out Film team would’ve expected Danny Boyle’s eye-wateringly hip, epoch-defining second feature to make much of a dent, let alone break into the top ten. Yet here we are, and it seems that ‘ Slumdog Millionaire ’ (which didn’t place) was not enough to make us overlook the ambition, charisma and sheer, blood, sweat and shit-soaked brio of this 1996 Irvine Welsh adaptation which gave Ewan McGregor a role that – if we’re being honest – he has never bettered.  The film – which now bizarrely makes the mid-1990s Britpop fad appear to have been the cultural highlight of modern times – told of happy-go-lucky junkie Mark Renton (McGregor) and the band of mischievous associates he would occasionally call friends, including Spud (Ewen Bremner), Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller), Tommy (Kevin McKidd) and Begbie (Robert Carlyle). It’s still a lively watch, especially in the way its meandering, episodic first half emphasises the highs of pub fights, drugs scores, casual sex and a sub-aqua, Eno-scored mission down the world’s most disgusting lavatory bowl, only for the second half to condemn the drug culture that so many claimed it was glamourising.  Director Danny Boyle had already shown with his previous film, ‘ Shallow Grave ’ (1994), that he could reel off a juicy, character-driven yarn which had depth and ambiguity, but what makes ‘Trainspotting’ stand above the crowd is the industrious way in which he uses editing and camera movement to convey time, activity, violence, love, ecstasy and pain. Plus, is this the greatest opening five minutes ever?  DJ

Buy, rent or watch ‘Trainspotting’

9.  If.... (1968)

Director Lindsay Anderson Cast Malcolm McDowell, David Wood, Richard Warwick

A portrait of life in an English, male boarding school may sound niche and conservative, but Lindsay Anderson’s second feature after ‘ This Sporting Life ’ was one of the most radical British movies of the 1960s – and the first of three films from that decade to enter our top ten.  The mischievous face of Malcolm McDowell as rebellious sixth-former Mick Travis is, in retrospect, an obvious predecessor of his character in ‘A Clockwork Orange’, not least when he iconically appears wearing a fedora and with a scarf wrapped around his face to conceal a moustache. From there, we discover that Travis and his two friends are thorns in the side of their rigid boarding house, where their peers exercise brutal authority purely because of their ties or badges – or, as Travis puts it, ‘That bit of fluff on your tit’.  Many scenes stick in the mind, most of them tinged with a strange comedy. There’s the master who rides a bike into class; the headmaster who opens a drawer to reveal a teacher; Travis’s wrestle with a waitress at a local café… But these more surreal scenes aside, the film’s success is down to its detail: Sherwin and Anderson well knew the world they were satirising, which is why the rituals, slang and behaviour all ring so disturbingly true. That said, the film’s knock-out scene is a rousing, shocking, guns-blazing climax that’s only credible as glorious wish-fulfilment.  The film’s attack on tradition and authority undoubtedly encapsulated and tapped into the counter-cultural mood of the time – but its themes of community, leadership, oppression and rebellion, as well as its edge of comic surrealism and weird fantasy, continue to endure more than forty years later.  DC

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8.  Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)

Director Robert Hamer Cast Dennis Price, Alec Guinness, Joan Greenwood

The Ealing comedies undoubtedly remain a bastion of British whimsicality, but the results of this poll suggest they have fallen out of favour. Does the fanciful madcap of ‘ The Lavender Hill Mob ’ now just feel empty? Has ‘ Passport to Pimlico ’ lost its political piquancy? And is there too much running around in that otherwise barbed consumerist satire, ‘ The Man in the White Suit ’? Still, you could judge that our contributors were merely hedging their bets by voting for Ealing’s finest: ‘Kind Hearts and Coronets’.  There’s something satisfying about the fact that one of the most charming, literary and romantic films  on this list involves a penniless fop going on a murderous rampage against his aristocratic in-laws. Dennis Price is Louis Mazzini D'Ascoyne, bon mot-dropping avenging angel and class warrior by default, out to take down the remaining D'Ascoyne clan (all played by Alec Guinness) as punishment for excommunicating his dear, dead mother.  The beauty of this film is how easy it is to divorce yourself from its horrors and side with this gentleman psychopath on his quest. Guinness’s broad (though hilarious) caricatures make the pill even easier to swallow, as they show us that Louis’s crimes are little more than a savage attack on the hypocrisy, entitlement and haughtiness of English blue bloods.  DJ

Buy, rent or watch ‘Kind Hearts and Coronets’

7.  Performance (1970)

Directors Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell Cast James Fox, Mick Jagger, Anita Pallenberg

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall at the first screening of ‘Performance’ for Warner Bros executives. Expecting a jolly, Beatles-esque musical romp starring those loveable rogues The Rolling Stones, they were subjected to 105 minutes of graphic gangland violence, explicit three-way sex, celebratory drug-taking and Mick Jagger in a dress. Dismissed on release as incoherent and indulgent (LA Times critic Richard Schickel described it as ‘the most worthless film I have seen’), ‘Performance’ has grown in stature and influence, culminating in its top ten appearance here, a leap of 41 places since the BFI’s similar list in 1999.  So why is a film which should, by rights, be too dated to watch still gaining traction well into its fourth decade? The sex ’n’ drugs ’n’ rock ’n’ roll aspects don’t hurt, but there’s more to it. Perhaps it’s simply that ‘Performance’ is the most perfect example of imperfection, a ragged, uncontrolled miasma of disparate influences and conflicting ideas, genres and even directors battling for dominance.  But where most superficially similar works of consciousness-expanding ’60s experimentalism are now embarrassing, ‘Performance’ manages to remain confrontational, exhilarating and relevant. True, there’s the odd awkward moment, and the depiction of women leaves something to be desired. But as the story fragments along with James Fox’s consciousness, as Jagger pouts and struts like the world’s sexiest junkie ostrich, as the visuals become more berserk and hallucinatory, you can almost hear Roeg and Cammell rubbing their hands together and chuckling at the sheer, mindblowing intensity and uniqueness of this monster they’ve somehow managed to create.  TH

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6.  A Matter of Life and Death (1946)

Directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger Cast David Niven, Kim Hunter, Roger Livesey, Raymond Massey

This is one of Powell and Pressburger’s most imaginative and thoroughly enjoyable films, but it's also one of Britain’s most substantial fantasy films, in that for all its visual invention, wit, romantic flair and sense of fun, it is most definitely about something.  Actually, of course, it’s about a number of things: the improbable love affair between a British pilot forced to bale out of his plane and the American girl who takes his mayday call; the long-tricky ‘special relationship’ between Britain and the US, strained during the later years of World War Two when the Americans were ‘over here’; and it’s perhaps even to some degree about the likewise uneasy relations between the practitioners of Britain’s documentary-realist tradition and those of the rather more flamboyantly ‘arty’ strand of filmmaking as perpetrated by Powell & Pressburger. (It may not be accidental that our quotidian earthly existence is shown in colour while the fanciful realm of the hereafter is consigned to the monochrome favoured by Grierson et al.)  Perhaps most importantly, however, it’s about exactly what it claims to be: the inevitably symbiotic relationship between life and death, which are in the end all part and parcel of the same thing. The heaven in the film not only reflects the need of many to believe in an afterlife where justice might finally prevail; it is also made quite explicit that it’s a dreamworld, the construct of the poet-pilot’s brain, in traumatic shock after he unexpectedly survives the plunge from his flaming cockpit. Quite dazzling.  GA

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5.  The Red Shoes (1948)

Directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger Cast Moira Shearer, Anton Walbrook, Marius Goring

The rise of The Archers, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, might be the big story in this new list of the 100 Greatest British Movies. Their presence was, of course, felt in a similar 1999 BFI list: ‘The Red Shoes’ placed in the top ten, with three other films (‘ A Matter of Life and Death ’, ‘ Colonel Blimp ’ and ‘ Black Narcissus ’) and Powell’s ‘ Peeping Tom ’ lurking further down the list. This latest poll has added only two new titles (‘ A Canterbury Tale ’ and ‘ I Know Where I’m Going! ’), but it’s the change in rank which is astonishing: not one of these films has fallen outside the top 30, with two in the top ten and another three in the mid-teens. Considering that their votes were split seven ways, The Archers have received far more votes than any other director on the list.  The increased availability of their work on DVD will have played a major role here, particularly in the rediscovery of the two new titles. But there’s been a shift in critical fortunes, too, beginning before the BFI round-up but gathering pace since: while the gritty heavy-handedness of the Angry Young Men has begun to seem increasingly irrelevant, the emotional richness, subtle wit and visual inventiveness of The Archers’ films seems ever more enchanting and poignant.  And the pinnacle of their achievements remains ‘The Red Shoes’: investing an old story with freshness and vigour and revelling in unabashed emotional excess, this is the absolute peak of Powell’s visionary tendencies as a director, a flawless blend of cinema and dance, animation and music, narrative rigour and experimental freedom, without doubt the most breathtakingly beautiful film ever to come out of these isles.  TH

Buy, rent or watch ‘The Red Shoes’

4.  Kes (1969)

Director Ken Loach Cast David Bradley, Lynne Perrie, Freddie Fletcher

As the tide of the 1960s began to recede, taking with it all that class-obsessed ee-by-’eck pub-jazz new wave chest-beating that had threatened to drag British cinema into some kind of socialist-modernist-industrial nightmare, the real realists were revealed, sitting quietly and waiting for someone to notice. And chief among them was (and still is) Ken Loach, this country’s most relentless cinematic artisan, 47 years at the cultural coalface and still no sign of flagging.  ‘Kes’ was Loach’s second feature film, and just a few years later he was struggling to make work for cinema at all: proof, perhaps, that honesty isn’t always the best policy. Because ‘Kes’ is, if nothing else, a powerfully honest piece of work, in its performances and relationships, its treatment of trapped lives, its sad-eyed acceptance of human failings. It’s trite but true to say that Billy Casper stands for the crushed child in all of us, with his beloved kestrel as the soaring soul that school, work, family and society conspire to kill quietly in the woodshed.  But this isn’t the true horror of the film. Because Loach is not just suggesting that Billy’s fate is inevitable, but that it’s necessary: in order to survive in this world of barking gym teachers, harried parents and brutalised big brothers (each of them once as open and inspired as Billy), he’ll have to take his lumps and like it. And so ‘Kes’ remains devastating, the peak of British realism and one of the most heartbreaking works in all of cinema.  TH

Buy, rent or watch ‘Kes’

3.  Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988)

Director  Terence Davies Cast  Pete Postlethwaite, Freda Dowie

Too often it’s assumed that there’s an arthouse cabal in British cinema obsessed solely with telling stories of the working classes from a distant perspective and with a drab realism – or, to borrow the moaners’ own word, ‘miserabilism’. Certainly, there are guilty culprits, but if any filmmaker blows such assumptions out of the water, it’s Terence Davies, whose ‘Distant Voices, Still Lives’ is arguably among the very greatest British movies of the last 25 years – a judgement our poll seems to confirm. The doubly good news is that, after a hiatus of a decade, 65-year-old Davies is back behind the camera making feature films and is currently editing an adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s ‘The Deep Blue Sea’, his first film since 2000’s ‘ House of Mirth ’.  This fiercely literate and independent Liverpudlian spent the first 16 years of his career, with three shorts, and then two feature films, ‘Distant Voices, Still Lives’ and ‘ The Long Day Closes ’ (1992), finding different, personal and poetic ways of making sense of his recollections of his childhood in a post-war, working-class Liverpool home. ‘Distant Voices…’ is essentially a portrait of his parents and siblings around the time he was born – but with Davies himself removed from the frame. As such, its fractured, truthful evocation of life in 1940s and ’50s Liverpool is as much about memory as truth. We experience the stuff of life – the brutality of a patriarch (Pete Postlethwaite), a daughter’s wedding, sing-songs at the pub – but the flow of the film is more emotional than chronological, and Davies prefers resonant images and moments to straightforward storytelling. Its songs lift us, while its sadnesses bring us down. Mostly, though, it’s Davies’s love for cinema that is apparent in every single frame of this beautiful film.  DC

Buy, rent or watch ‘Distant Voices, Still Lives’

2.  The Third Man (1949)

Director Carol Reed Cast Joseph Cotten, Orson Welles, Alide Valli

It swooped in at number one on the BFI’s 1999 British cinema poll, but here, Carol Reed’s The Third Man’ will have to settle for second spot. But, hey: it’s still a masterpiece. The genius at the core of this superlative, bible-black Euro noir is the way it teases you into thinking that you’re watching a disposable pulp yarn about an honest schlub who touches down in a crumbling, post-war Vienna and won’t rest until he uncovers a conspiracy concerning the death of an old pal.  Our hero, Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten), is a writer of dimestore westerns. His pal is Harry Lime (Orson Welles), a bootlegger whose latest grift has landed him in an early grave, or so it seems. The further down the rabbit hole Holly ventures, the more it becomes clear that Reed’s glibness is mere cover for a bleak lament to a world tainted by corruption and evil. Replace Vienna with Los Angeles, and it’s basically ‘Chinatown’.  Inventive and exhilarating though the story is, its beauty lies in its flawlessly judged and occasionally eccentric construction: Robert Krasker’s high-contrast cinematography; Anton Karas’s eerily chipper zither score; and the depiction of a world so divided by politics, religion, gender and language, that you begin to understand why compassion would lose its appeal to these characters. ‘Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever?’ asks Harry Lime. It’s a chilling conundrum that rings with truth and despair, and one of which politicians, businessmen and, well, everyone, should continually be wary.  DJ

Buy, rent or watch ‘The Third Man’

1.  Don't Look Now (1973)

Director Nicolas Roeg Cast Julie Christie, Donald Sutherland The number one film on our list of greatest British movies, is Nicolas Roeg’s hallucinatory 1973 Daphne du Maurier adaptation – the story of a couple, played by Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland, who decamp to a spooky Venice after the death by drowning of their daughter. We can speculate on the roots of its popularity: that it satisfies the genre and arthouse crowds; that it uses framing, sound, editing and camera movement to unreel a transfixing tale and flesh out excruciatingly authentic characters; that it dares to coax out the ghosts lurking in every watery passageway in Venice, Europe’s most ornate and singular city; that it contains arguably the greatest sex scene on film. Or, we can just accept it as a movie whose every glorious frame is bursting with meaning, emotion and mystery, and which stands as the crowning achievement of one of Britain’s true iconoclasts and masters of cinema.  DJ

Buy, rent or watch ‘Don't Look Now’

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The 50 best films of 2022 in the UK

The No 1 film is a stunning directorial debut, one of the finest cinematic moments of any year – see which other movies you may have missed

• Read the US Top 50 movies of 2022
• More of the best culture of 2022

This list is compiled by the Guardian film team, with all films released in the UK during 2022 in contention. Check in every weekday to see our next picks, and please share your own favourite films of 2022 in the comments below.

Compartment No 6

Finnish director Juho Kuosmanen directs this answer to Before Sunrise, about an archaeology student who shares a train compartment with a boorish Russian; the pair connect despite their differences. Read the full review

• Top Gun: Maverick

Tom Cruise returns almost four decades on for another bout of speed and need: this time he is the mentor to a new generation of navy fighter pilots, led by Miles Teller, playing the son of Maverick’s late wingman, Goose. Read the full review

Paris, 13th District

The latest film from Rust and Bone director Jacques Audiard, here putting together a short story collection of sexual encounters and relationships in Paris’s 13th arrondissement, shot in tough black-and-white. Read the full review

Golden Lion-winning abortion drama, more relevant than ever, from director Audrey Diwan; a study of a woman (played by Anamaria Vartolomei) who becomes pregnant in early-60s, pre-legalisation France. Read the full review

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery

Entertaining second dose of Rian Johnson’s labyrinthine crime mystery, with Daniel Craig on good form as Hercule Poirot-esque detective Benoit Blanc, here investigating a murder-themed party that turns deadly. Read the full review

Split-screen dementia drama from Argentine provocateur Gaspar Noé, starring Dario Argento and Françoise Lebrun as an elderly couple whose lives are dogged by the latter’s cognitive decline. Read the full review

The Woman King

Stirring period epic starring Viola Davis as the leader of the Agojie, a brigade of female warriors in west Africa who are attempting to see off threats from the Oyo empire as well as from slave-buying colonialists. Read the full review

Brian and Charles

David Earl and Chris Hayward’s story of an inventor’s relationship with his creation blends Caractacus Potts with Victor Frankenstein to heartwarming effect. Read the full review

French-Senegalese film-maker Alice Diop offers a sensitive portrayal of the disparate communities that live along one of Paris’s commuter rail lines, in a documentary predating her acclaimed fiction feature debut, Saint Omer. Read the full review

Everything Went Fine

André Dussollier and Sophie Marceau are outstanding in François Ozon’s wonderfully observed story about a father and daughter whose tricky relationship is upended when he asks for her help to die. Read the full review

Benediction

Terence Davies’s account of the life of Siegfried Sassoon (played by Jack Lowden and Peter Capaldi in younger/older versions), tracing his career from lionised war poet to unhappy later life. Read the full review

Prayers for the Stolen

A heart-rending study of the traumatising life experience of a Mexican woman trying to ensure her daughter escapes the attentions of rapists and narcos who can apparently operate with impunity. Read the full review

Mysterious fable from Italian director Laura Samani, about a woman desperate to revive her stillborn baby who heads off on a quest to find the church that may be able to accomplish it. Read the full review

Great Freedom

Intriguing German drama about a former concentration camp inmate imprisoned after the war for gay sex acts, and who develops a complex relationship with his straight cellmate. Read the full review

Social-comment body horror from debut feature director Ruth Paxton, with Sienna Guillory as the apparently perfect single mother with two daughters, one of whom develops a mysterious eating disorder. Read the full review

All Quiet on the Western Front

Anti-war nightmare of bloodshed and chaos where teenage boys quickly find themselves caught up in the ordeal of trench warfare, in a German-language adaptation of the first world war novel. Read the full review

Lingui, the Sacred Bonds

Chadian auteur Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s quiet fable, about a woman torn between social proprieties and respecting her daughter’s decision to get an abortion. Read the full review

All That Breathes

Two Indian brothers dedicate themselves to rescuing birds that are being poisoned by pollution in this complex and quietly beautiful film. Read the full review

Vicky Krieps puts in a star turn as lonely, patronised Elizabeth of Austria in Marie Kreutzer’s austere drama that functions as a cry of anger from the pedestal-prison of an empress. Read the full review

Crimes of the Future

As he did with 90s hit Crash, David Cronenberg’s horror sensation creates a bizarre new society of sicko sybarites where pain is the ultimate pleasure and “surgery is the new sex”. Read the full review

The Worst Person in the World

Thelma director Joachim Trier comes up with an unexpectedly moving drama about a twentysomething woman (played by Renate Reinsve in a star-making performance) as she navigates relationships and jobs at a tricky period in life. Read the full review

The Souvenir Part II

Second half of Joanna Hogg’s autobiographical drama, with Honor Swinton Byrne as film student Julie as she abandons her social issue documentary in favour of making her own autobiographical memoir. Read the full review

American Honey director Andrea Arnold’s meaty slice of bovine socio-realism, detailing the life of dairy cows with unflinching and empathic precision. Read the full review

Complex metafiction of fear in which now-jailed director Jafar Panahi plays a version of himself, forced to shoot his new film in a town near the border with Turkey. Read the full review

White Noise

Don DeLillo’s novel of campus larks and eco dread gets an elegant, droll film treatment from Noah Baumbach, starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig. Read the full review

The Gravedigger’s Wife

Gentle, funny drama of a man seeking money for his spouse’s operation and his sick spouse from Somali-born director Khadar Ayderus Ahmed. Read the full review

Fire of Love

Romantic portrait of passionate, doomed volcanologists embraces the mythology around Maurice and Katia Krafft, the scientists who died in the 1991 Mount Unzen disaster. Read the full review

Powerful documentary on the legacy of slavery showing how an illegal slave ship led to the creation of an Alabama community of inherited trauma but also defiance. Read the full review

Deeply disturbing drama about mass killer Martin Bryant which shies away from depicting the Port Arthur massacre itself – but outstanding performances mean it is still a highly unsettling story. Read the full review

The Innocents

Creepy-kid horror from Norwegian director Eskil Vogt (co-writer of The Worst Person in the World ), about two young sisters who make friends with other children who apparently possess supernatural powers. Read the full review

The Northman

Brutal Viking saga based on the same legend as Shakespeare’s Hamlet, with Alexander Skarsgård as the chieftain’s son out for vengeance on the man who murdered his father and took his throne. Read the full review

Official Competition

Penélope Cruz is on fire in delicious movie industry satire in which she plays an eccentric director using unorthodox techniques to manage lead actors – and polar opposites – Antonio Banderas and Oscar Martínez. Read the full review

Exquisitely sad drama starring Bill Nighy in a Kazuo Ishiguro-scripted remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 film Ikiru about a man dealing with a terminal diagnosis. Read the full review

You Won’t Be Alone

Spellbinding horror movie from director Goran Stolevski, a witch story that follows a shapeshifter in a 19th-century village. Read the full review

Jason Isaacs and Ann Dowd are among the cast of a drama about the “healing” meeting between the parents of a high-school shooting victim, and the parents of the perpetrator. Read the full review

Bones and All

Teen cannibal romance with Timothée Chalamet and Taylor Russell, who dazzle in Luca Guadagnino’s blood-soaked parable of poverty and rebellion. Read the full review

Seven-year-old Maya Vanderbeque is brilliant in this Belgian schoolyard drama, as a girl called Nora who tries to confront classroom bullies in this short, intense film. Read the full review

The Banshees of Inisherin

Guinness-black comedy of male pain in which Martin McDonagh reunites Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson in remotest Ireland for an oddball study of isolation and hurt. Read the full review

Moonage Daydream

Glorious, shapeshifting eulogy to David Bowie from director Brett Morgen, whose intimate montage of the uniquely influential artist celebrates his career, creativity and unfailing charm. Read the full review

Funny Pages

Deliciously dark coming-of-age comedy from Owen Kline, that fuses teen innocence with adult sexuality in a bad-taste debut film that recalls American Splendor and Crumb. Read the full review

Decision to Leave

South Korean director Park Chan-wook’s sensational black-widow noir romance, starring Tang Wei, keeps the viewer off-balance at every turn. Read the full review

Tilda Swinton joins forces with Thai auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul for an English-language, Colombia-set fable about a woman who can hear sounds that others don’t appear to. Read the full review

Haunting adaptation of Emma Donoghue’s story of divine possession, with Florence Pugh as a nurse who is sent to a rural Irish village to investigate a young girl who appears to be perfectly healthy despite not having eaten for months. Read the full review

Multilingual, pan-Indian, historical-action-romance blockbuster set in the 1920s, following a pair of real-life revolutionaries as they take on the might of the British Raj. Read the full review

Hit the Road

Beautifully composed debut feature from Panah Panahi, the son of jailed Iranian film-maker Jafar Panahi, this tense family drama is drenched in a subtle but urgent political meaning. Read the full review

Licorice Pizza

70s-set romance from Paul Thomas Anderson, starring Cooper Hoffman as a former child actor who sets his sights on 10-years-older Alana Haim as he gets into the waterbed business. Read more

Distinctive fusion of documentary and animation from Danish film-maker Jonas Poher Rasmussen, outlining the journey and heartache of a gay Afghan man living in Copenhagen, having left his home country as a 10-year-old. Read more

Parallel Mothers

Penélope Cruz and Pedro Almodóvar collaborate once again to tremendous effect; this time Cruz plays a woman sharing the same maternity ward as a much younger, troubled mother to be (played by Milena Smit ). Read more

The Quiet Girl

Deeply moving tale of rural Ireland in which a silent child is sent away to live with foster parents on a farm, in a gem of a film from first-time feature director Colm Bairéad. Read more

Father-daughter bonding drama starring Paul Mescal and nine-year-old Francesca Corio, attempting to navigate post-divorce family life in a Turkish beach resort. A brilliant debut feature from Charlotte Wells. Read the full review

• Best films UK 2022
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Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, the english.

“The English,” a new six-part mini-series on Prime Video, is a Western about outsiders made by an outsider. There’s always a bit of a different flavor when someone not from the United States tackles the most homegrown of genres, the Western. And one can feel the influence of Sergio Leone and the Spaghetti Western all over Brit Hugo Blick ’s captivating drama, a show that bursts out of the gate with two of the best episodes of TV this year before getting a bit too languid and talky in its mid-section. Thankfully, it regains its footing, and never loses its visual confidence or style even through the slow stuff. This is a drama about lands shaped by violence and eroded by vengeance, a genre exercise with fantastic performances and film-caliber technical elements. Western fans definitely won’t want to miss it.

After a prologue that details the tumultuous state of existence in middle America in 1890, “The English” thrusts its two protagonists together in a long scene of fateful twists. Lady Cornelia Locke ( Emily Blunt ) arrives in the United States to avenge the death of her son but is immediately threatened by greedy, violent criminals played marvelously by Toby Jones and Ciaran Hinds . As she’s thrown from the carriage to Hinds’ feet, she sees the figure of a beaten man hanging at the edge of the property. It is Eli Whipp ( Chaske Spencer ), a Pawnee ex-cavalry scout who now intends to get his promised land from the government he fought for even though he knows in his heart that he’s unlikely to get it easily. These are both people pushing back against a broken system, one that rewards the greedy and the unjust, and they will end up essentially on the road together to a small town called Hoxem, Wyoming.

This mini-Deadwood in Wyoming is led (barely) by a sheriff named Robert Marshall ( Stephen Rea ), who is stumped by a series of local murders that may involve a young widow named Martha Myers ( Valerie Pachner ). As everything builds toward a series of revelations and showdowns in Hoxem, familiar faces pop up including memorable turns by Rafe Spall and Gary Farmer (so good on “Reservation Dogs”). Much of “The English” consists of long dialogue exchanges punctuated by extreme violence. It’s a fascinating equation as this is essentially a show about people who believe that they will only get what they want by force and yet it’s also remarkably rich in dialogue and character interaction. The opening episode conversation between Hinds and Blunt over a dinner table that includes prairie oysters (look it up) isn’t as self-aware as Quentin Tarantino but recalls similar exchanges in his films like “Django Unchained” and “ Inglourious Basterds ”—scenes in which you know all the witty back and forth is probably going to end in bloodshed.

Blick sometimes indulges a bit too much in these lengthy exchanges, especially in episodes three and four, and he allows the storytelling to get cluttered in flashbacks when the season needs to be building momentum after its explosive opening episodes. However, through it all, the show remains a visually engaging experience. Blick and his team are very interested in iconic Western imagery—silhouettes against a big blue sky, close-ups of furtive eyes, etc.—but also in digging beneath the imagery to the truth of a land of broken promises, both those made to the people told they could start a new life there and the ones whose land was stolen. Late in the season, someone speaks of the difference between traveling with hope vs. just traveling without fear, and it feels like a show about a time in America when hope was in very short supply. Some travelers to new communities like Hoxem may have traveled without fear, but it wasn’t because they hoped for a bright future as much as they had no other choice.

Even as “The English” sags a bit in terms of storytelling, the performances remain stellar through the season. Hinds and Jones have a blast in their episode, and Rea is typically strong, but the show belongs to Blunt and Spencer, who are both phenomenal. Blunt has always been able to balance vulnerability and strength, and those two traits exist in the same beat in some of her choices here in a captivating way. Spencer understands how to carry regret in his body and his tone, capturing a man who may be numbed by what he’s seen perpetrated on his people but hasn’t allowed that to overwhelm his decency. They both have such wonderful voices, which give “The English” the air of classic genre cinema at times if you close your eyes. Every time that Blunt and Spencer start volleying dialogue, it's easy to just get lost in this show. 

The streaming mini-series has become such an oversaturated field that something like “The English” could get lost in the crowd. Like the characters it profiles, it deserves a chance at happiness and to carve out some of the landscape for itself.

Premieres on Prime Video on Friday, November 11 th .

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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The 16 Best Movies on Amazon Prime Right Now

In Recent years, Netflix and Apple TV+ have been duking it out to have the most prestigious film offerings, but some of the best movies are on Amazon Prime Video. The streamer was one of the first to go around picking up film festival darlings and other lovable favorites, and they’re all still there in the library, so if they flew under your radar the first time, now is the perfect time to catch up.

Our picks for the 16 best movies on Amazon Prime are below. All the films in our guide are included in your Prime subscription—no renting here. Once you’ve watched your fill, check out our lists for the best shows on Netflix and best movies on Disney+ if you’re looking for something else to watch. We also have a guide to the best shows on Amazon if that’s what you’re in the mood for.

If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more .

Everybody’s Talking About Jamie

Adapted from the stage play of the same name—which in turn was based on a true story—this joyful musical charts the journey of Jamie New (Max Harwood). Bullied at school for being gay, and estranged from his homophobic father, Jamie dreams of escape through the art of drag—and when he finds a mentor in retired drag performer Hugo Battersby (a scene-stealing Richard E. Grant), he's soon on his way to bringing his inner queen “Mimi Me” to life. Rooted in Sheffield, England, it's a tale that dances between themes of class and culture while celebrating the importance of self-expression and the liberating power of drag.

Every high school has its social hierarchy, and PJ (Rachel Sennott) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri) are at the bottom of theirs. Known as the “ugly, untalented gays” even to the faculty, their only hope of getting with two of the school's most popular cheerleaders, Isabel (Havana Rose Liu) and Brittany (Kaia Gerber), is, err, setting up an all-girl fight club to teach them how to handle their cheating, disrespectful jock boyfriends. OK, it might sound like the set-up to some dodgy ’70s exploitation flick—and with an approach to violence that straddles the line between raucous and ridiculous, it's never a million miles removed from that—but Bottoms is far smarter and more subversive than its premise would suggest. Defying expectations at every turn, this is the queer, rage-filled, hilarious twist on the high school comedy you (probably) never knew you needed.

Oxford student Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) is having trouble fitting in at the prestigious British university—until he befriends the popular Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi). Handsome, rich, and born to the landed gentry, Felix brings the awkward, socially invisible Oliver into his circle, eventually inviting him to spend summer at the family estate, Saltburn. But as Oliver works his way into the family's graces, his obsession with Felix takes increasingly dark and deranged turns. Oscillating between black comedy and psychological thriller, writer and director Emerald Fennel ( Promising Young Woman ) frames the film in 4:3 aspect ratio for a tighter, almost voyeuristic viewing experience that makes its frequently unsettling moments even more uncomfortable. Having attracted plenty of debate since its 2023 release—not least for how it questionably navigates its themes of class and social inclusion— Saltburn was one of the year's most divisive films, but one that demands your attention.

Courtroom dramas are rarely laugh riots, but this tale of funeral home director Jeremiah O'Keefe (Tommy Lee Jones) and his flashy lawyer Willie Gary (Jamie Foxx) taking on a major player in America's "death care" system brings a dark sense of humor to already grim proceedings. This is no comedy though. Based on true events, director Maggie Betts' ( The Novitiate ) latest drama retells a real-life legal case that exposed massive inequality in funereal care and the way Black communities were being regularly overcharged. Foxx and Jones are in top form throughout, but it's Jurnee Smollett as Mame Downes, Gary's rival attorney who threatens to outpace him at every turn, whose performance threatens to steal the whole movie. For a film about death, The Burial proves warmly life-affirming.

A Million Miles Away

Charting the life of José Hernández, this biopic—based on Hernández's own book—mixes the aspirational with the inspirational as it follows its central figure's rise from, in his own words, migrant farm worker to the first Mexican-American astronaut. Michael Peña is in fine form as Hernández, painting a picture of a man almost myopically driven to reach space, no matter the cost, while Rosa Salazar impresses as his wife Adela, refusing to fade into the background even as she puts her own dreams on pause for José to chase the stars. In lesser hands, this could all be cloying—a twee tale of hard work and achieving the American Dream, with a dash of NASA promo material on the side, but director Alejandra Márquez Abella has her lens as focused on the small beauties of life here on Earth as the splendor and sheer potential of space. A rare delight.

Red, White, and Royal Blue

Look, this is clearly a “best film” by a highly specific metric—and that metric is “gloriously cheesy trash.” Adapted from Casey McQuinston's best-selling novel, this intercontinental rom-com charts the relationship between First Son Alex Claremont-Diaz (Taylor Zakhar Perez) and Prince Henry (Nicholas Galitzine), the "spare" to the British throne, going from rivals through to grudging respect, and ultimately groundbreaking romance. It's often ludicrous, including an inciting incident seeing the pair falling into a wedding cake, a tabloid-worthy tryst in a hotel room, and political intrigue surrounding Alex's mother, President Ellen Claremont (Uma Thurman, vamping scenes with a bizarre “Texan” accent), but it's all just irresistibly wholesome and upbeat. Red, White, and Royal Blue is the movie equivalent of pizza—not good for you, but still delicious.

Shin Masked Rider

If you’re sick of cookie-cutter Hollywood superhero movies, then this ground-up reboot of one of Japan’s most beloved heroes deserves your attention. Helmed by Hideaki Anno ( Evangelion , Shin Godzilla, Shin Ultraman —“shin” meaning “new” or “true” in Japanese), this revamps the 1971 TV series Kamen Rider. Like that show, it follows motorcyclist Takeshi Hongo (Sosuke Ikematsu). Kidnapped by the terrorist organization S.H.O.C.K.E.R. and forcibly converted into a powerful cyborg, Hongo escapes before being reprogrammed as an agent of the group, instead using his newfound powers to take down its forces. However, unlike the original, Anno’s approach taps into the body horror of the core concept, while also challenging his characters—and audience—to hang onto their intrinsic humanity in the face of a world trying to dehumanize them. It’s more violent than you’d probably expect, often showing the grisly outcome of regular people getting punched by superpowered cyborgs and monsters, but never gratuitous. While those with some understanding of the source material will get more out of Shin Masked Rider , it’s an exciting outing for anyone looking for something a bit fresher from their hero movies.

Sure, nowadays Michael Jordan is a bona fide sports god, and Nike’s Air Jordan sneakers are still arguably  the court shoe—but that wasn’t the case back in 1984. Jordan was a rookie, and Nike was about to close down its basketball shoe division. Enter Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon), a talent scout for the footwear maker who has spotted a rising star in North Carolina who could turn everything around—he just needs to convince everyone else that Jordan is worth betting the company on. We all know how that panned out, so thankfully  Air is more than a two-hour advert for shoes. Damon, Jason Bateman, Chris Tucker, and director Ben Affleck all deliver strong performances—only to be utterly eclipsed by Viola Davis in a magnetic and powerful, if somewhat underutilized, turn as matriarch Deloris Jordan—while Alex Convery’s script keeps the drama on the people and personalities involved, rather than the boardroom. In an age of franchises and endless blockbusters,  Air is the sort of character-focused film that rarely gets made anymore, and is all the more enjoyable for it.

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm

Sacha Baron Cohen’s “Kazakh” TV reporter (even if he speaks Hebrew) travels back to the US, 14 years after his last feature-long escapade. This time Baron Cohen has brought his (Bulgarian-speaking) teenage daughter along, with the mission of giving her “as a gift” to some powerful American politicians—initially Mike Pence, then Rudy Giuliani. In classic Boratic fashion, the mockumentary follows the wacky duo on a cavalcade across Trump’s America, filming candid performances by unsuspecting characters ranging from QAnon believers to Republican activists to prim debutantes, all the way to Giuliani himself. Even the coronavirus pandemic, which struck America as the film was being shot, is subverted as a comedic plot point. Baron Cohen delivers, with the expected repertoire of shock gags and deadpanned verbal enormities, and he manages to land some punches at the expense of bigots, too. In contrast to its 2006 predecessor, many of the pranks and stunts here seem more aimed at eliciting the audience’s nervous laughter than at exposing America’s heart of darkness, but it remains a worthy—and funny—watch.

Shotgun Wedding

A raucous spin on the traditional romcom,  Shotgun Wedding lures viewers with a cliché setup—a ceremony on a tropical island, with hijinks courtesy of bickering in-laws—before exploding, literally, into an action escapade as the wedding party is taken hostage by violent pirates. If we’re being honest, it’s a little hammy and self-aware in places, but leads Jennifer Lopez and Josh Duhamel are clearly having so much fun as bride and groom Darcy and Tom, whose special day turns into an often hilariously gory battle for survival, that it’s easy to be swept along for the ride. With a solid supporting cast, including the ever-entertaining Jennifer Coolidge as the mother of the groom stealing every scene she graces with her gloriously chaotic presence, this is a wedding worth RSVPing to.

Aisha (Anna Diop) is a Senegalese woman working as a nanny for a rich couple in New York City, hoping to earn enough to bring her son and cousin to join her in America. However, her future is at the mercy of her employers, who seem content to leave Aisha to raise their daughter, Rose, while often withholding her pay. As the stress of the power imbalance weighs on her, Aisha begins having strange dreams of drowning, worsened by her fears of abandoning her own child. The feature debut of director Nikyatu Jusu,  Nanny contrasts the horror of the immigrant experience in modern America with something darker, while swapping the expected tropes of hope and opportunity for a palpable sadness for culture and community left behind.  Nanny takes a slow-burn, psychological approach to its scares, but Diop is phenomenal throughout, and the meticulous pacing and gorgeous cinematography means every frame lingers.

Coming 2 America

Relying on nostalgia to carry new entries in long-dormant series can be risky business, but Eddie Murphy’s return to the role of Prince—now King—Akeem of Zamunda more than three decades after 1988’s Coming to America shows how to do it right. Drawn back to the US in search of a son he never knew he had, Akeem—and the audience—gets to reunite with familiar faces from the first film, before director Craig Brewer ( Hustle and Flow ) reverses the formula and tests the American characters with a trip to Zamunda. With a sharper, smarter, and more globally aware script than the original, Coming 2 America defies the odds to be a comedy sequel that stands up to the reputation of its predecessor.

Thirteen Lives

Director Ron Howard’s latest gathers a top-notch cast—including Viggo Mortensen, Colin Farrell, and Joel Edgerton—for a dramatization of the 2018 Tham Luang cave rescue, where a Thai junior soccer team and their assistant coach were trapped in the flooded cave system. As an international effort mounts to save the children, the challenges of navigating miles of underwater caverns become ever more dangerous, and Howard masterfully captures every perilously claustrophobic moment of it. A nail-bitingly tense movie with some ingeniously shot aquatic scenes, Thirteen Lives is a testament to one of the most difficult rescues ever performed.

One Night in Miami …

Based on the play of same name, One Night in Miami follows four icons of culture, music, and sports—Malcolm X, Jim Brown, Sam Cooke, and Muhammad Ali—at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, a converging and pivotal point in their lives and careers. Meeting in a motel room in the wake of Ali’s—then still Cassius Clay—heavyweight victory over Sonny Liston in 1964, the four men discuss their roles in the movement and society as a whole, all while the audience knows the weight of history is bearing down on them. The close confines of much of the film reflect its theatrical roots, but this feature directorial debut from Regina King perfectly portrays the larger-than-life personalities of its cast. Kingsley Ben-Adir is on fire as Malcolm X, with Aldis Hodge, Leslie Odom Jr., and Eli Goree—as Brown, Cooke, and Ali—all utterly magnetic.

Produced by Amazon, The Report is an engrossing depiction of the US Senate's investigation into the CIA's “enhanced interrogation” program—how it came to be, who knew about it, and how the CIA massaged the facts to support its efficacy. Adam Driver stars as Daniel Jones, the lead investigator who plowed an increasingly lonely path to the truth, battling against political resistance and CIA interference all the way. Driver is, as is his habit these days, superb, and the film's 82 percent “fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes is well earned.

Sound of Metal

Punk-rock drummer and recovering addict Ruben starts experiencing hearing loss, and it threatens to upend his entire life. Faced with an impossible choice between giving up his hearing or giving up his career, Ruben begins to spiral, until his girlfriend Lou checks him into a rehab center for the deaf, forcing him to confront his own behavior as much as the future he faces. Riz Ahmed is in spectacular form as the troubled Ruben, while Olivia Cooke’s turn as Lou, who suffers with her own demons, including self-harm, is riveting. Fittingly enough, Sound of Metal also features incredibly nuanced use of sound—and its absence—as director Darius Marder crafts one of the finest dramas in recent years.

Matt Burgess

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8 New Movies Our Critics Are Talking About This Week

Whether you’re a casual moviegoer or an avid buff, our reviewers think these films are worth knowing about even if you’re not planning to see them.

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By The New York Times

A vampire flick with a familiar bite.

A group of bumbling criminals kidnap a young girl and hold her for ransom, but the titular 12-year-old ballerina turns out to have more than just tulle up her sleeve.

From our review:

A cheerfully obvious splatterthon, the new horror movie “Abigail” follows a simple, time-tested recipe that calls for a minimal amount of ingredients. Total time: 109 minutes. Take a mysterious child, one suave fixer and six logic-challenged criminals. Place them in an extra-large pot with a few rats, creaking floorboards and ominous shadows. Stir. Simmer and continue stirring, letting the stew come to a near-boil. After an hour, crank the heat until some of the meat falls off the bone and the whole mix turns deep red. Enjoy!

In theaters. Read the full review .

Less-than-glorious “basterds.”

‘the ministry of ungentlemanly warfare’.

Based on a true story of an (until recently) unknown World War II operation, this film features some ungentlemanly types who are tasked with cutting off Germany’s resources by sinking their supply ships.

“The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare,” the latest offering from the director Guy Ritchie, is a perfect airplane movie. That is not a compliment, but it’s not exactly a dis. Some movies shouldn’t be watched on planes — slow artful dramas, or movies that demand concentration and good sound (please do not watch “ The Zone of Interest ” on your next flight). But you’ve got to watch something, and for that, we have movies like this one.

Like if Dorothy Gale was your Uber driver.

‘the stranger’.

In this thriller, originally released as 13 short-form episodes on the streaming service Quibi, the indie-film scream queen Maika Monroe plays a Los Angeles transplant fresh from Kansas who works as a ride-hail driver who must face off against a murderous passenger.

The recut version (on Hulu) bears little trace of its earlier form, although its life span across algorithm-driven streaming companies does cast the villain’s tech preoccupations — “whoever figures out the mathematical formula determining the losers and the winners in life will rule” the world, he declares — in a new, meta light.

Watch on Hulu . Read the full review .

A queer period piece — but the period is summer 2020.

‘stress positions’.

After New York goes on lockdown, Terry (John Early) clashes with the other tenants of the brownstone he shares with his soon-to-be-ex-husband.

If some of the points seem muddy, the filmmaking is expressive and deliberate. With shimmer, shadow and verve, “Stress Positions” — which recently closed the New Directors/New Films festival — captures the often hallucinatory pandemonium wrought by that “long-ago” moment.

The prince and the pauper fall in love.

Ryuta (Hio Miyazawa) is a personal trainer with an ailing mother, a big secret and no cash. Can a romance with a wealthy magazine editor fix his problems, or do their differences doom their relationship from the start?

Class is the central theme in “Egoist”: Kosuke and Ryuta’s star-crossed romance shows us how money, and the struggle to make ends meet, can complicate even the most genuine love. But as the film leans into melodrama, it loses both its friction and frisson, and a steaming-hot premise turns into something cold to the touch.

There’s always one more “one last job.”

‘blood for dust’.

Seventeen months after a theft scheme goes horribly wrong, two former colleagues-in-crime reunite for a drug-running operation.

Directed by Rod Blackhurst, “Blood for Dust” is a throwback, in the sense of being exceedingly familiar. An early shot of a snow-covered parking lot inevitably evokes “Fargo,” but “Blood for Dust” doesn’t have a witty line or a glimmer of humor. The climactic shootout is so dimly lit that it’s difficult to discern who is firing at whom. It’s easy enough to guess.

In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms . Read the full review .

A private world of childhood friendship, ruptured.

‘we grown now’.

Two young boys, residents of the Cabrini-Green public housing development in Chicago, confront harsh realities while also chasing whimsy (including an excursion to the Art Institute of Chicago).

You’re immediately invested in Malik and Eric, who together have formed a private world that, like the museum, exists apart from real life, its pressures and its dangers. The sound design is particularly effective at conveying the little bubble that the children have created for themselves. The babble of outside voices and music in Cabrini never seems to stop flowing, but you never really hear what anyone says.

Zack Snyder serves up a chaotic stew of references.

‘rebel moon — part two: the scargiver’.

The second half of Zack Snyder’s space opera follows a group of interplanetary warriors as they attempt to defeat an imperial army.

The script by Snyder, Kurt Johnstad and Shay Hatten trips over its aspirations whenever any character talks. There’s not a single authentic conversation, just exposition dumps and soliloquies. Finally, after an hour of speeches, we’re treated to an hour of rousing warfare. Primal, pitiless, agonizing carnage is where Snyder excels. He’ll kill anyone, even nice people, even grandmothers-turned-guerrilla warriors who just want to get back to folk dancing.

Watch on Netflix . Read the full review.

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The life and music of Amy Winehouse, through the journey of adolescence to adulthood and the creation of one of the best-selling albums of our time. The life and music of Amy Winehouse, through the journey of adolescence to adulthood and the creation of one of the best-selling albums of our time. The life and music of Amy Winehouse, through the journey of adolescence to adulthood and the creation of one of the best-selling albums of our time.

• Sam Taylor-Johnson
• Matt Greenhalgh
• Marisa Abela
• Eddie Marsan
• Jack O'Connell
• 46 User reviews
• 56 Critic reviews
• 50 Metascore

• Amy Winehouse

• Mitch Winehouse

• Blake Fielder-Civil

• Cynthia Winehouse

• Joey the dealer

• Janis Winehouse

• Nick Shymansky

• Raye Cosbert

• Artist Development Man

• Chris Taylor

• Perfume Paul

• Aunt Melody

• Uncle Harold
• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

• Trivia Marisa Abela did all the singing in this film herself. She trained extensively to mimic Amy Winehouse 's vocals.

Technical specs

• Runtime 2 hours 2 minutes

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