DAĬast Vincent Price, Diana Rigg, Ian Hendry This is the first of only two Boyle films to feature in this list. 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. 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. 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 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. DAīuy, rent or watch ‘The Railway Children’Ĭast Cillian Murphy, Naomie Harris, Brendan Gleeson Nice to see it make the list of best British movies, albeit in the penultimate spot. 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. Jenny Agutter and little Sally Thomsett are the film’s cornerstones, but a special mention to Bernard Cribbins’s archetypal British stationmaster. 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. Recommended: London and UK cinema listings, film reviews and exclusive interviews.Ĭast Dinah Sheridan, William Mervyn, Jenny AgutterĪs 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. Written by Dave Calhoun, Tom Huddleston, David Jenkins, Derek Adams, Geoff Andrew, Adam Lee Davies, Paul Fairclough, Wally Hammond, Alim Kheraj & Phil de Semlyen It’s safe to say they all know their onions. To put together this list we polled over 150 actors, directors, writers, producers, critics and industry bigwigs from the likes of Wes Anderson, Mike Leigh, Ken Loach, Sam Mendes and Terence Davies, David Morrissey, Sally Hawkins and Thandie Newton. As ‘Paddington’s billion or so devotees will tell you.įrom science-fiction and horror, to romance and comedy, there is something for everyone on a list that parses down the tens of thousands of movies made in Blighty into a hundred all-time greats. Sure, the British film industry tends to eschew the bigger CG end of the blockbuster scale – budgets don’t stretch quite into the ‘ Avengers’ strata – but it still has some mighty fine VFX-enhanced flicks of its own to boast about. From David Lean epics to Joanna Hogg micro-dramas, British movies boast every kind of cinematic experience you could possibly yearn for.