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The 100 best British films
Time Out counts down the best British films, as chosen by the film industry
Read our contributors' top tens
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Contributor index
Explore the individual selections of every contributor
Discover more Time Out film lists
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Horror films
Voted for by over 100 experts including Simon Pegg and Roger Corman
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Comedy movies
The 100 best comedy movies, picked by experts from across film, TV and comedy
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Best British Films
We select the greatest Brit cinema
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Films of the 00s
So here it is… Ten years, thousands of movies and millions of dollars in international box offi...
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Best animated films
Time Out ushers in the help of master animator Terry Gilliam to run down 50 of the greatest anima...
By Dave Calhoun, Tom Huddleston and David Jenkins, with Derek Adams, Geoff Andrew, Adam Lee Davies, Gareth Evans, Paul Fairclough and Wally Hammond. Explore the individual top tens of every contributor.
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100
In This World (2002)
Dir Michael Winterbottom (Jamal Udin Torabi, Enayatullah)
Kings of the road
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
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99
The Railway Children (1970)
Dir Lionel Jeffries (Dinah Sheridan, William Mervyn, Jenny Agutter)
A real sleeper hit
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, albeit in the penultimate spot. DA
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98
School for Scoundrels (1960)
Dir Robert Hamer (Ian Carmichael, Alastair Sim, Terry-Thomas)
‘He who is not one up… is one down!’
‘We hate it when our friends become successful,’ Morrissey once said about Britain: Robert Hamer and his writers were closer to the mark in suggesting that most of us would happily put the boot into anyone who even approaches success. And amen to that! Bounders, cads and a good portion of hard cheese fill out this toothy confection of just-coherent, raffish ribaldry. It may be little more than a loose collection of sketches – Peter Jones and Dennis Price’s ‘Winsome Welshmen’ car salesman schtick, for instance, was lifted from the BBC radio comedy show ‘In All Directions’ – held together by a script based on Stephen Potter’s thoughts on gamesmanship, lifemanship and ‘the struggle for pure prestige’, but there’s something so irrepressibly beastly and underhand about the whole business that one can’t help but – imagine a velveteen Terry-Thomas accent – join the club, old chap! ALD
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97
28 Days Later… (2002)
Dir Danny Boyle (Cillian Murphy, Naomie Harris, Brendan Gleeson)
This town is coming like a ghost town
The first scene in Danny Boyle’s symbolic UK-set zombie fest is hairy in more ways than one: a group of animal activists descend on a biological vivisection centre and release a chimpanzee infected with rage, a contagious rabies-like virus. 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. The zombie segments, while tense, violent and gruesome, are a sideshow to the story’s main thrust: our predisposition towards outright selfishness and savagery when even our most basic of needs are whipped from beneath our feet. There have been similar plague-based apocalyptic films both before and after – 1971’s ‘The Omega Man’ and its 2007 offshoot ‘I Am Legend’, for instance – but this one is especially poignant for British viewers, if only because the unfolding events are so much closer to home. This is the first of only two Boyle films to feature in this list. DA
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96
Theatre of Blood (1973)
Dir Douglas Hickox (Vincent Price, Diana Rigg, Ian Hendry)
Stage fright
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
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95
London to Brighton (2006)
Dir Paul Andrew Williams (Lorraine Stanley, Johnny Harris, Georgia Groome)
It’s grim down South
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
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94
24 Hour Party People (2002)
Dir Michael Winterbottom (Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon, Ron Cook)
Manchester, so much to answer for…
In a national cinema prone to self indulgent rock follies (‘Tommy’, ‘The Wall’, ‘Give My Regards to Broad St’), the best British music films are those which refuse to take their subjects as seriously as themselves. A perfect case in point is the disconnect between Anton Corbijn’s mournful, largely forgettable 2007 kitchen sink biopic ‘Control’, which placed Ian Curtis on a tortured-artist pedestal, and Michael Winterbottom’s lurid, lively Madchester romp ‘24 Hour Party People’, which presented the Joy Division frontman as a sadistic, sarcastic Tory loudmouth: hell to live with, perhaps, but painfully human. The film remains one of the purest pleasures in modern British cinema: scrappy, inconsistent, inventive, insightful, heartfelt and wickedly funny. TH
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93
Zulu (1964)
Dir Cy Endfield (Stanley Baker, Jack Hawkins, Michael Caine)
Fahsands of ’em... comin’ over the hill!
‘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
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92
Dead Man's Shoes (2004)
Dir Shane Meadows (Paddy Considine, Gary Stretch, Toby Kebbell)
Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord
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
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91
Land and Freedom (1995)
Dir Ken Loach (Ian Hart, Icíar Bollaín, Tom Gilroy)
Homage to Catalonia
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. The film 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
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Comments
I wanted to disagree with this list but the reviewers made it very difficult. I have 9 out of the top 10 and thought they were all excellent so no complaints from me. Get Carter maybe shouldve been higher. But sincere thanks for leaving out Guy Richie!
what a shite and uninteresting list . Featuring movies from the 1940´s purely because of the fact there are enough decent British movies being made these days is a pathetic attempt to glorify the obviously sub standard British film industry . Pass me a prawn sandwich .
Where is Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels? Where is Snatch? And Trainspotting should be in the Top 3
Enjoyed the poll , but where was my favorite film I.D, as well as Twin Town, Love honour and Obey?
And what about Cashback... positively brilliant little indie flick. Just like Trainspotting and A Clockwork Orange I think it too will have its own following
In wich we serve was one of the best 40s films made and should be listed.
Miller changes a little bit . He and Benedict played
the Frankenstein.
I still love this film.
What happened to Sir John Mills who was in some great films : In Which We Serve, The Way To The Stars, Ryan's Daughter and more than 120 other movies and he is only mentioned once for Great Expectations.
This could qualify as the most terrifying yet at the same time the most beautiful film i have ever seen its evocation of venice loss and the loveliness of julie christie!! .Didnt we all want to look like that?The end is truly horrific the mist enters your living room and how can you understand ?Iit truly fantastic and unutterably memorable and what an unusual but sublime casting
Here are some suggestions: In the Name of Our Father, My Left Foot, O Lucky Man, The Wind that Shakes the Barley, Hard Day's Night, The Hound of the Baskervilles. Our Mutual Friend, Look Back in Anger, Casino Royale (Peter Sellers). Bridge on the River Kwai, Blythe Spirit.
Yes very strange list and I agree with other's that commented on great films that were missed out.
A Room With A View, Howard's End, The Remains of the Day.
Billy Elliott, The Crying Game, Mona Lisa, Harry Brown. Slumdog millionaire
I think the iconic Lady Killers should have been first, its just a perfectly formed masterpiece. But I think depressing reality has won over for your judges.
There is still something to be said for damn good entertainment! Maybe do another list and let the people vote? Yes the list will not be so pretentious but thats not a bad thing.
Delighted to happen upon your 100 and delightfully surprised to note your No.1. I saw it when it first came to Ottawa and the ending caused my hair to stand on end. Somehow unsatified, I went again the next night and, yes, I used the comb again. It belongs beside The Shining. Missed 7Up.
I must add a "cheers" to everything (that I know of) Masterpiece Theatre and Channel 4.
Alun
What a random list. It over represents certain directors at the expense of better films (and heavily biased by the directors who were on the committee). 2 x Roeg + 2 x Powell/Pressburger (& not their best) in the top 10, but not Hitchcock, Losey or Leigh (ok, 11 is close, but am I alone in thinking that Naked is not his best?). The list also has foreign directors, foreign actors, foreign settings....what qualifies as British? Glaring Ommissions: Prick Up Your Ears, Darling, Victim, A Zed & Two Noughts, The Cook/Wife/Thief/Lover, Forever & A Day, I Am A Camera, The Ruling Class, A Taste Of Honey, Look Back In Anger, Lock/Stock/Barrels, Brighton Rock, Paranoiac, The War Zone, Room With A View . Gratuitious Inclusions: Peeping Tom, The Witchfinder General, Dracula, 24 Hour Party People, Barry Lyndon, 4 Weddings. Am I alone in thinking that Powell/Pressburger are over rated & don't hold up well?
Just looked through the first 40 films - not a single film since 1999, and only 3 or since the eighties. Has the British film industry not made a film since, worthy of accolade? So many excellent recent films, most mentioned already by others, maybe the listmakers will review their choices one day...
Where's Tim Roth's The War Zone?
A Room With A View, Howard's End, The Remains of the Day.
Ang Lee's Sense and Sensability
Billy Elliott, The Crying Game, Mona Lisa, Harry Brown.
Antonia Bird's Priest.
Trainspotting at number 10. Really? Has anybody voting rewatched that lately, it hasn't aged well at all. I didn't undertsnad the critical adulation at the time, now I find it unwatchable. 'Shallow Grave' and '28 Days Later' were both better films.
20 - 11 would be a better top 10.
Nice to see 'Nuts In May' make an appearance. Even if it is a TV play and not a feature film.
Not much from the last 15 years which is odd - How about 'Dirty Pretty Things', 'Last Resort'. 'My Summer Of Love', also the omission of 'Snatch' and 'Lock Stock' is just snobbery surely.
PS: You may want to spell check the Third Man review.
shirley a great movie is measured by which movies you've watched at the cinema more then once. Full \Monty and Life of Brian for me.
"Oliver!" Are you joking? Where's "Whistle Down the Wind?" Glad to see "The Offence" made the list though. One of my favourite films.
What a lazy, up-itself list. Just because a film was made before 1960 does not automatically make it better than anything made since then. I suspect the pretentious knobwits at Time Out would have you think otherwise.
Wow! What a pretentious list! I wonder what the average age of the people polled was as, correctly pointed out below, it seems to omit the past 20 years of British cinema.
Also, what makes a film British? There are a number of titles on that list that were made by foreign directors, used foreign actors or were produced using foreign (mainly US) money. It is apparent that the criteria for selection was not fully explained otherwise you would not have, for example, Witchfinder General (a film that has not aged well at all) above 2001!!!
It is an incredibly bleak list. Where’s the fun? Anyone looking at it would think we are a nation obsessed with war, alcohol, social deprivation, self-loathing and drugs (OK – fair point!).
A few omissions IMO (unless I overlooked them in the list) – The Italian Job, Brassed Off, The Full Monty, the Constant Gardener, The Madness of King George, Quadrophenia, Gandhi, Slumdog Millionaire...
Wow! What an incredibly pretentious list! Wonder what the average age of the people polled was as it has pretty much overlooked the last 25 years of British Cinema.
What makes a film British anyway? This list is full of films with foreign directors, foreign actors and a lot of them were made with foreign (mainly US) money. It is obvious the criteria was not laid down sufficiently as you would not have Witchfinder General (a B-movie at best) above 2001!!!
It is an incredibly bleak list as well. Where's the fun? Anyone looking at it would think we are a nation obsessed with war, self-loathing, social deprivation, alcoholism and drugs (alright - fair point).
A few ommissions IMO - Quadrophenia, The Full Monty, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, The Italian Job, The King's Speech, Pride and Prejudice, Slumdog Millionairre, The Constant Gardener...
What a ridiculous list. Only a handful of films made in the last 20 years feature, and most of them come at 90-100 because clearly EVERY OTHER British film has already been listed ahead of them.
Codswallop.
No John Boorman? No John Boorman? Enjoyed the list as a talking point but no John Boorman?
Massive omissions? 'A Taste of Honey' (do you seriously think that 'Four Weddings blah blah.' is a better film?). Also, 'Spring and port Wine', 'Melody' and 'If...'...come on, where are they?
OK, I spoke too soon. THE THIRD MAN was second, even though a vastly better film than DON'T LOOK NOW. What is it with people overrating PERFORMANCE, which is quirky and weird, but not great.
Two other comments. First I'm a huge Powell and Pressburger fan. Even own all their films on DVD (except ONE OF OUR AIRCRAFT IS MISSING). But even given my huge love for them I think there are too many of their films in the Top Twenty. But better than being unjustly neglected.
Second, I've read around 12 to 15 books on Hitchcock, listened to every commentary on every one of this films that has a commentary, and know that most Hitchcock scholars rate THE LADY VANISHES as his greatest British film. So why does THE THIRTY NINE STEPS, a film that I do in fact love, always rank higher on lists like this? Those most expert on Hitchcock always rank it below THE LADY VANISHES. Just a comment. I love them both, but I incline towards THE LADY VANISHES.
DON'T LOOK NOW???????
I've seen that 3 or 4 times and while it is gorgeous to look at, I would not call it even a very good film. Vastly less of a film than THE THIRD MAN.
I'll have to look at this list a bit more closely, but any list that doesn't put THE THIRD MAN in the top 2 or 3 is really iffy.
Chariots of FIre? ---- it certainly is my personal top 10.
The Ipcress File? -----perhaps the best British Spy Film
As far as I know, Donald Sutherland is from Saskatchewan, which was located in Canada the last time I looked. Hollywood has a habit of turning all actors who don't have foreign accents into American actors, and this has helped to create the myth that all North Americans who don't have British accents are either U.S. citizens or French Canadians.
Another vote for O Lucky Man , I also have a soft spot for Overlord & O What a Lovely War.
This list is for me anyway, inspiring , demonstrating how British Cinema is grossly underrated.
I urge anyone who hasn't seen 'Tunes of Glory' to try to do so. It contains some of the best performances you will ever see from Guinness ansd Mills and just gets a grip on the class system.
I urge anyone who hasn't seen 'Tunes of Glory' to try to do so. It contains some of the best performances you will ever see from Guinness ansd Mills and just gets a grip on the class system.
Lists like these are always likely to stir up dissent however, I think the truly world class British directors (Powell, Hitchcock and Lean) are well represented but would have had Lawrence of Arabia at number 1, followed by "The Third Man" and "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning". Can't see that Kubrick has any Britishness at all. "Women in Love" "The Charge of the Light Brigade" and "Tom Jones" should be in any list of great british films. I also have a soft spot for "The Ruling Class" and "Gumshoe."
Am I the only one who thought "The WInd that Shakes the Barley" was bloody brilliant.
Winterbottom is dishonest, pretentious, calculating, sensationalist fraud. There should no films of his in this list.
Uh, Donald Sutherland is Canadian. You'd think his director would know that.
Nothing by Olivier? Maybe he's unfashionable at the moment, but Henry IV is still the first great Shakespeare film and remains one of the most colorful, buoyant, and magical films ever made in the UK.
brilliant list;
those I'd have liked to ahev seen are
OF TIME AND THE CITY
RED ROAD
MY SUMMER OF LOVE
LAST RESORT
BABYLON (was this for TV though?)
BULLET BOY
BROTHERS IN TROUBLE
MY SON THE FANATIC
FOUR LIONS
MORVERN CALLAR
NUNS ON THE RUN (joking!)
oh yeah forgot - OF TIME AND THE CITY. One of the best odes to a city and a life ever committed to film and it happens to be about my home city Liverpool. Terence Davies = National Treasure. I prefer LONG DAY CLOSES to DISTANT VOICES. Pete Postlethwaite RIP. Special mention to the very short AMONGST GIANTS... (that film felt chopped! but was still brilliant)
oh yeah forgot - OF TIME AND THE CITY. One of the best odes to a city and a life ever committed to film and it happens to be about my home city Liverpool. Terence Davies = National Treasure. I prefer LONG DAY CLOSES to DISTANT VOICES. Pete Postlethwaite RIP. Special mention to the very short AMONGST GIANTS... (that film felt chopped! but was still brilliant)
oh yeah forgot - OF TIME AND THE CITY. One of the best odes to a city and a life ever committed to film and it happens to be about my home city Liverpool. Terence Davies = National Treasure. I prefer LONG DAY CLOSES to DISTANT VOICES. Pete Postlethwaite RIP. Special mention to the very short AMONGST GIANTS... (that film felt chopped! but was still brilliant)
Super list. A few films that would've been good to include would be Babylon (or was that made for TV), Bullet Boy (by Saul Dibb) and Andrea Arnold's Red Road.
My Son The Fanatic - which is probably (the crap intro aside) the very best Hanif Kureishi Film adapt to date. Brothers In Trouble is largely overlooked too....
Last Resort and My Summer Of Love would also elbow a few out... and maybe the Robert Carlyle move from a few years back called Summer. That was flawless.
Thanks for a great skive though.
Where is Ken Russell???
The Devils, The Music Lovers and Women in Love to name but three!
Ridiculous to miss off the great Master!
I agree with the posters more than the 'experts'. OLM, HDN etc even Little Voice. Of course you can't get everything in or even hope to be 'accurate' (unless you take a true consensus which means only the film literatti get to vote), and I think that the point of this is far from trying to actually provide a list of academic interest, it's just more empty hype for the medium (which isn't film here).
Great list! Even Hammer makes awell-deserved appearance! I'm sure many will complain about the number of Archers films, but how could you leave any off? I wish Edgar Wright were on there, as well as The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, & Her lover, and Lord of the Flies. 28 Days Later and Four Weddings & A Funeral could be justifiably removed to make room.
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