DJ, Director Nicolas Roeg Cast Jenny Agutter, David Gulpilil, Lucien JohnIn which Nicolas Roeg generously invents our one-time colony’s national cinema for it. A fabulously entertaining family musical, then, but one that, I suspect, is on this list for nostalgic value alone. Mojin The Worm Valley . 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. DJ, 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. 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. Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1974), 36. 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. Our list of the best British movies has both, James Bond, and classic romantic comedies. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943). GE, Director Shane Meadows Cast Paddy Considine, Andrew Shim, Ben MarshallThe importance of imperfection cannot be overlooked in British film: 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. Sort by: Tag popularity - Top Rated - Top Rated Popular - Want to watch - Release Date - Recently wanted - Date Added. 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. Tomatometer rankings of the top 100 best movies of 2020 and all time. 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. DA, Director Karel Reisz Cast Albert Finney, Rachel Roberts, Shirley Anne Field, 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. 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. DA, 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. Ignominious doesn’t begin to cover it. TH, Director Alexander MackendrickCast Basil Radford, Joan Greenwood, Jean CadellIn 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. DC, Buy, rent or watch ‘The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp’, 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 film – 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. 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. Many scenes stick in the mind, most of them tinged with a strange comedy. DC, Director Stanley KubrickCast 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’. 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. 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’. Movies tagged as 'English' by the Listal community. But nudge the lurid Technicolor brutality aside and what you have is a film which depicts the act of consuming the moving image as a way of psychologically participating in the acts of those on screen. Try another? My list of must see "Top 100 English Movies" (not in that Order) of all time. ‘Consider Yourself’, ‘Got to Pick a Pocket or Two’ and the title song are all up there with the best in the musical genre. By entering your email address you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy and consent to receive emails from Time Out about news, events, offers and partner promotions. There’s the odd over-fruity line or performance, but a stunning final night-time chase sequence in a railway depot more than compensates. 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. It also happens to be my favourite film ever. Cut to 28 days later and Cillian Murphy’s cycle courier awakens from a hospitalised coma to find a near deserted, dystopian London populated by violent rage victims. But, hey: it’s still a masterpiece. DC, 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 film remains one of the purest pleasures in modern British cinema: scrappy, inconsistent, inventive, insightful, heartfelt and wickedly funny. DC, Director Alfred Hitchcock Cast Oscar Homolka, Sylvia Sidney, John Loder, ‘Sand! DJ, 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. 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. 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. It’s ruthlessly intelligent stuff, and the conclusions are strangely prophetic. 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. DA, Director Michael Powell Cast Karl Böhm, Anna Massey, Maxine Audley, This magical mystery tour of Soho knocking shops and glossy TV studios was Michael Powell’s defiant ‘up yours’ to all that was good and sacred in the late 1960s. 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. 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. As Edward Lionheart, Price plays a ham passed over for the award he most cherishes: Best Actor as voted by the Critics’ Circle. 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. 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. The increased availability of their work on DVD will have played a major role here, particularly in the rediscovery of the two new titles. ALD, Director Carine Adler Cast Samantha Morton, Claire Rushbrook, Rita TushinghamWomen directed only four of our top 100 films, 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. Horror? DA, Buy, rent or watch ‘The Railway Children’, 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.