15 Best British Movies Of All Time, Ranked

From the witty delights of the Ealing comedies to the humanity of kitchen-sink realism to the lush big-budget period romances of the ’90s and 2000s, the cinema of the United Kingdom is among the richest in the world.

Ranking the 15 best British movies of all time is basically an impossible task to carry out fairly in any kind of satisfying way, but let’s go ahead and try anyway. The list below makes an earnest attempt to shout out the U.K.’s most astonishing cinematic achievements — with the field limited to a maximum of one movie per director, in order to spread the wealth as much as possible.

• Year: 1969
• Cast: Glenda Jackson, Alan Bates, Oliver Reed
• Director: Ken Russell
• Rating: R
• Runtime: 131 minutes
• Where to watch: DVD/BluRay

This iconic adaptation of the eponymous 1920 D.H. Lawrence novel finds Ken Russell inching closer to the full-blown feverish mania that would make later genre exercises like “The Devils” and “Altered States” the stuff of midnight movie legend. Even as Russell remains perched upon respectable costume drama, “Women in Love” reaches such delirious heights of sexual and intellectual fortitude that the prim, awards-friendly gloss comes to feel like an elaborate prank — a bodice worn just to be ostentatiously ripped.

Jennie Linden and an Oscar-winning Glenda Jackson star as sisters who begin a dalliance with two best friends (Alan Bates and Oliver Reed) in the years following World War I. The movie gets stunningly down and dirty in its exploration of the four protagonists’ twitchy psychosexual dynamic, drawing more blood than the vast majority of period pieces made five decades later. It genuinely feels like a film beamed back through time.

• Year: 2019
• Cast: Honor Swinton Byrne, Tom Burke, Tilda Swinton
• Director: Joanna Hogg
• Rating: R
• Runtime: 120 minutes
• Where to watch: Fandango At Home, Kanopy, The Roku Channel, Apple TV (rent/buy), Prime Video (rent/buy)

It’s one thing to make autobiographical fiction, but what Joanna Hogg does in “The Souvenir” feels too advanced for existing terminology. Loosely fictionalizing the story of her own years in film school, Hogg operates on multiple levels. In the most fundamental sense, she’s telling a story about a young, impressionable woman (Honor Swinton Byrne) weathering the irregular affections of a negging heroin addict (Tom Burke).

That layer alone is brilliantly realized, with enough muted sadness, lived-in detail, and photographic poetry to sustain a movie by itself. But then there’s the other layer: “The Souvenir” is the story of the creative mind who went on to make “The Souvenir.” And so we watch through our fingers as Hogg unpeels the emotional and intellectual charge going into her own method, and weaves every cut and every blocking cue into the overarching story of how Julie came to deal with her own pain. It’s 3D-chess cinema.

• Year: 1987
• Cast: James Wilby, Rupert Graves, Hugh Grant
• Director: James Ivory
• Rating: R
• Runtime: 140 minutes
• Where to watch: The Criterion Channel, Fawesome, Kanopy, Philo, Apple TV (rent/buy), Fandango At Home (rent/buy), Prime Video (rent/buy)

Few directors have shaped the public perception of what constitutes “British cinema” to the same extent as James Ivory, whose exuberantly intelligent and affecting period dramas under Merchant Ivory Productions essentially became a genre unto themselves. And the greatest Merchant Ivory film is also the most personal. In a career that often found him porting unmistakably queer sentiment onto stories of doomed straight love, “Maurice” finds Ivory getting down to brass tacks and directly tackling what it was to be gay in Edwardian England, with utterly stirring results.

“Maurice” adapts the posthumously-published E. M. Forster novel of the same name, itself a landmark work of queer literature, and locates in it a perfect matrix for archaeology-as-psychology. Ivory makes Maurice Hall’s (James Wilby) world so texturally tangible that his own interiority geysers out through every moment, washing the screen with indescribable feeling.

• Year: 1938
• Cast: Margaret Lockwood, Michael Redgrave, Paul Lukas
• Director: Alfred Hitchcock
• Rating: PG
• Runtime: 96 minutes
• Where to watch: Artflix, The Criterion Channel, Darkroom, Fandor, FlixHouse, fuboTV, HBO Max, Hoopla, IndieFlix, JustWatch TV, Philo, Plex Player, Pluto TV, Prime Video, Public Domain Movies, The Roku Channel, Xumo Play, YouTube, YOW.tv, Apple TV (rent/buy), Fandango At Home (rent/buy)

It has become somewhat lost in the historical memory of Alfred Hitchcock’s medium-defining Hollywood success that, long before becoming the “Psycho” and “Rear Window” guy, he was a British director making British films. Those films, less crammed with global superstar talent and blockbuster production value though they may have been, already made Hitchcock’s genius perfectly clear — and the best of them, “The Lady Vanishes,” ranks up there with the top tier of British cinema.

A perfectly succulent thriller concept drawn from an Ethel Lina White novel, it revolves around a woman (Margaret Lockwood) who befriends a stranger (May Whitty) aboard a train, takes a nap, and wakes up to find that her new friend is no longer there and no one seems to remember her. This narrative becomes a track for Hitchcock to glide through with nervy, virtuosic showmanship, delivering zap after zap to the viewer’s adrenal glands. It’s one of the very best Alfred Hitchcock movies.

• Year: 1989
• Cast: Richard Bohringer, Michael Gambon, Helen Mirren
• Director: Peter Greenaway
• Rating: NC-17
• Runtime: 124 minutes
• Where to watch: DVD/BluRay

Peter Greenaway is such a proudly, idiosyncratically off-book filmmaker that even his equivalent of an accessible crowd-pleaser still qualifies as one of the most bizarre movies of all time. “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, & Her Lover” is so nonchalantly liberated in its deployment of radical violence and sexuality that it feels ahead of its time by design, destined for initial shock and awe that would then dissolve into wider admiration for the movie itself within the Grand Guignol event.

Simply put, Greenaway’s melodramatic-romantic-crime-comedy set among the patrons of a swanky restaurant is cinema at its most ferociously thrilling and beautiful, in everything from color to montage to performance — the result of a master putting his form-breaking skills in service of unbound entertainment.

• Year: 1970
• Cast: James Fox, Mick Jagger, Anita Pallenberg
• Directors: Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell
• Rating: R
• Runtime: 105 minutes
• Where to watch: Apple TV (rent/buy), Fandango At Home (rent/buy), Prime Video (rent/buy)

Of the many ’60s and ’70s classics that took stock of Swinging London, Nicolas Roeg and David Cammell’s “Performance” is the one where form and content meet most dashingly. The whole premise is like an invitation to cathartic disalignment. A huffing and puffing gangster (James Fox) takes refuge from his own brash decisions by assuming a new identity and hiding out in a Notting Hill Gate house, which turns out to be occupied by a trio of artsy free-loving hippies. Cue the erosion of his entire gun-toting macho identity.

It adds something, of course, that one of the hippies in question is played by Mick Jagger, in a performance (ahem) of entrancing, domineering androgynous charisma that makes you wonder about the Werner Herzog movie role he almost played. But “Performance” is far from a stunt casting event: What Roeg and Cammell do in it is nothing less than use montage, music, and mischief to reimagine British cinema from scratch.

• Year: 1972
• Cast: Sheila Allen, Susanka Fraey, Liz Dancinger
• Director: Jane Arden
• Rating: Not rated in the U.S. (18 in the U.K.)
• Runtime: 133 minutes
• Where to watch: Fawesome, Midnight Pulp, Philo

Sheila Allen gives one of the most incredible performances in movie history in “The Other Side of the Underneath,” a legendary feminist masterpiece from Jane Arden that took decades to reach the wide availability that would enable its recognition as a classic. Like “Performance,” it’s a movie in which formal invention is the only possible channel for a story about the fraud of accepted normality.

“The Other Side of the Underneath” tells the story of Meg (Allen), a woman whose schizophrenia diagnosis is but a convenient label to exculpate society for years of gendered trauma, repression, and anguish. The movie is radical both in its empathy and in the means by which it expresses it. Arden inundates the viewer with a flurry of starkly original, utterly terrifying mental photograms, deconstructing the entirety of the British patriarchal system without once straying from the manifestation of Meg’s tormented inner life.

• Year: 1993
• Cast: Derek Jarman, Tilda Swinton, John Quentin
• Director: Derek Jarman
• Rating: Not rated in the U.S. (15 in the U.K.)
• Runtime: 79 minutes
• Where to watch: Hoopla, Kanopy, Plex Player

Groundbreaking filmmaker and visual artist Derek Jarman was among the numerous casualties of the U.K. government’s neglectful response to the ’80s AIDS crisis, and by 1993, he was rapidly losing one of his most precious creative assets: his eyesight. Partly blind and seeing the world only in shades of blue, Jarman marshaled his fiery activist spirit into a movie that could be alternatively interpreted as an effort to clue the world in on his struggle, or to boldly rub it in the world’s face.

“Blue,” which would become Jarman’s final film and summarizing thesis statement, consists of a static Klein Blue screen displayed for 79 minutes, accompanied by a layered soundtrack made up of various musical pieces, careful sound design, and narration by John Quentin, Nigel Terry, Tilda Swinton, and Jarman himself voicing the maelstrom of urgent feelings and ideas that took over Jarman’s mind in his final years. Never mind the sheer formal audaciousness: This is one of the most intimate, rich, thought-provoking, and devastating movies of all time.

• Year: 1992
• Cast: Leigh McCormack, Marjorie Yates, Anthony Watson
• Director: Terence Davies
• Rating: PG
• Runtime: 85 minutes
• Where to watch: The Criterion Channel

Terence Davies made movies that felt like someone else’s foggy memories somehow played out onto your retina, and “The Long Day Closes” is his most transcendental achievement. Davies writes and directs the story of Bud (Leigh McCormack), a lonely 12-year-old boy from Liverpool whose everyday life in the postwar ’50s makes up in art, imagination, and quiet beauty for what it sorely lacks in freedom and comfort.

The film is as free-flowing as cinema gets, narrative only to the extent that things happen in it. Davies renders Bud’s life not through drama but through fragments of audiovisual poetry, with the bountiful soundtrack curation providing the closest thing to a throughline. It’s a movie that moves and looks like nothing else, with excruciating attention to the prison-like closed loops of working-class British life — yet the affection it extends to Bud’s tight-knit family, fledgling romanticism, and constant escape to the movie theater rings so familiar that you might as well have lived it all yourself.

• Year: 1975
• Cast: Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle
• Director: Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones
• Rating: PG
• Runtime: 91 minutes
• Where to watch: BritBox, Fawesome, fuboTV, Kanopy, Peacock, Pluto TV, Prime Video, The Roku Channel, Shout! Factory TV, Plex Player, Apple TV (rent/buy)

How does a comedy troupe known for its mastery of free-form, quasi-nonsensical, fourth-wall-skipping sketch comedy go about putting together a theatrical feature film? The answer: By breaking the rules of storytelling, and treating the film medium itself as another institution to be relentlessly mocked. “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” is so committed to its own manner of shaggy surrealist satire that it barely even coheres into a “movie.”

And yet, narrative structure is hardly to be missed when the laughs are this big and constant. Indeed, this brisk 92-minute send-up of Arthurian legend is so packed to the gills with legendary jokes that it has a different kind of structure altogether. It’s as though every scene started from the engineering prompt of “What’s the funniest thing that could possibly happen next?” with the correct answer — whether involving silly names, abrupt interruptions, arguments with the audience, obscure songbird trivia, or dismembered knights who refuse to die — being found every single time.

• Year: 1949
• Cast: Joseph Cotten, Orson Welles, Alida Valli
• Director: Carol Reed
• Rating: PG
• Runtime: 104 minutes
• Where to watch: Artflix, IndieFlix, Kanopy, Apple TV (rent/buy), Fandango At Home (rent/buy), Prime Video (rent/buy)

A masterpiece of historical inventory somehow released at the exact moment that it chronicles, “The Third Man” turns the harrowed ruins of postwar Vienna into the Platonic ideal of a film noir setting. Director Carol Reed was British, as is the Allied enclave of the Austrian capital in which the film takes place, but this is just as much an international triumph. It’s filled with German-language background dialogue and stars Trevor Howard as a newly-arrived American who soaks up the city in tandem with the mysterious death of the friend who invited him there.

And then, Orson Welles waltzes into the screen in one of the most epic character introductions of all time, and “The Third Man” is clarified as a work at once entirely of its time and entirely out of it. It’s as if a totem of silent-era German Expressionism had wandered inexplicably into the U.K. in the late ’40s, while conversely exhibiting a cynical wisdom about the toll of World War II that films made 50 years later would struggle to match.

• Year: 2002
• Cast: Samantha Morton, Kathleen McDermott, Linda McGuire
• Director: Lynne Ramsay
• Rating: R
• Runtime: 97 minutes
• Where to watch: Fawesome, Kanopy, Prime Video, The Roku Channel

Lynne Ramsay inaugurated a new kind of cinema with “Morvern Callar,” and it was such a brazen, inimitable kind that, a quarter-century later, she’s still the only director in the world who’s really practicing it. The Scottish auteur’s particular style of subjective impressionism is hard to fully understand at first: Her rhythm is so deliberate and patient that it risks being mistaken for something in the vicinity of the default social realism of most film festival fare.

But Lynne Ramsay, perceptive as she is, is no mere observer. What she does through her tangy visual poetry, gigantic sound design, and fearless performance direction is bring indescribable mental states to pulsing, self-explanatory life. “Morvern Callar,” starring a never-better Samantha Morton as a taciturn young woman from the Scottish seaside who reacts in a very unusual way to her boyfriend’s suicide, allows this method to reach its peak; emotionally, sensorially, and existentially, nothing else in 21st-century cinema cuts quite this close to the bone.

• Year: 1996
• Cast: Brenda Blethyn, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Timothy Spall
• Director: Mike Leigh
• Rating: R
• Runtime: 136 minutes
• Where to watch: The Criterion Channel, HBO Max, Apple TV (rent/buy), Fandango At Home (rent/buy), Prime Video (rent/buy)

A fully comprehensive list of the best in British cinema history would have to cite at least seven or eight Mike Leigh features. His prickly, painful, actor-centric exercises in dramaturgical hypernaturalism (none of which have ever been rotten on Rotten Tomatoes) are as definitive of the last four decades of film in the U.K. as any director can possibly be. And it’s telling of the greatness of “Secrets & Lies” that, in an oeuvre this titanic, it still manages to tower above everything else.

Leigh creates his characters in close collaboration with his actors until they’re so rich in psychology, personality, and gestural vividness that they cease to feel like characters to the external observer. With “Secrets & Lies,” he gives a cast of generational performers the gift of a movie built entirely around their ability to inhabit complex, outsized feelings and messy confrontations. No dysfunctional family drama rivals this one for the feeling of barging into something discomfitingly private and real.

• Year: 1962
• Cast: Peter O’Toole, Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn
• Director: David Lean
• Rating: PG
• Runtime: 227 minutes
• Where to watch: Apple TV (rent/buy), Fandango At Home (rent/buy), Prime Video (rent/buy)

It’s the epic to end all epics — the one film that best embodies the concept of the movie screen as a magical window that can take up any chosen size. David Lean’s nearly four-hour account of the life of British Army officer T.E. Lawrence (Peter O’Toole) can get as big as the Nafud desert itself, and as small as the wrinkles on O’Toole’s face during a diplomatic fumble. At no point throughout its scale shifts is it anything less than enthralling.

It’s almost unfair that epic cinema’s greatest achievement in humongous, viscerally thrilling muscularity should exist alongside one of the genre’s few genuine displays of political and psychological acuity. Here, Lawrence emerges as an entrancing tortured protagonist to rival any canonical chamber drama. No wonder Steven Spielberg described it as a “major miracle.”

• Year: 1948
• Cast: Moira Shearer, Anton Walbrook, Marius Goring
• Director: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
• Rating: Approved in the U.S. (PG in the U.K.)
• Runtime: 135 minutes
• Where to watch: The Criterion Channel, HBO Max, Kanopy, Plex Player, Pluto TV, The Roku Channel, Shout! Factory TV, TCM, YouTube, Apple TV (rent/buy), Fandango At Home (rent/buy), Prime Video (rent/buy)

The melodramatic Technicolor swirl of “The Red Shoes” is a reminder of what movies can be. Nearly 80 years on, and we have yet to see another director recapture the perfect symphonic arrangement of light, scenery, montage, music, choreography, and storytelling that Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger concocted in this masterpiece among masterpieces. A movie good enough, incidentally, to be worth blocking out such monuments as “Peeping Tom” and “Black Narcissus” from this ranking.

With all due respect to every other British movie in history, “The Red Shoes” is just too much. Its metatextual story of a ballerina (Moira Shearer) who finds herself torn between love and art as her life is fused with the eponymous Hans Christian Andersen-inspired ballet, is so formally and emotionally all-encompassing that it legitimately scans as the purpose for which film was invented.