The flagship of the GPO Film Unit's output and a cornerstone of British documentary. Harry Watt and Basil Wright's study of the down postal express stands as a beacon for John Grierson's original purpose for documentary - to make the working man the hero of the screen. A truly collaborative effor...

Documentary, public information film, morale booster; propaganda film – all descriptions that apply to Humphrey Jennings and Stewart McAllister's extraordinary war-time film. Using his customary combination of poetry and propaganda, Jennings constructs a collage of the various people and classe...

Humphrey Jennings epitomises the artist-filmmaker and this poetic evocation of ordinary people enjoying well-earned time away from the mill, mine, or foundry is a forerunner to Jennings’ later wartime greats such as Listen to Britain. Joyous shots of people either pigeon fancying, ballroom dan...

Karel Reisz’s honest and sympathetic depiction of South London teens aimed to challenge the media perception of ‘Teddy Boys’, and would be one of the last films to appear under the Free Cinema banner. One of the key elements of the Free Cinema films was the sympathetic representation of wor...

Hailed as Britain's first black feature film, Pressure is a hard-hitting, honest document of the plight of disenchanted British-born black youths. Set in 1970s London, it tells the story of Tony, a bright school-leaver, son of West Indian immigrants, who finds himself torn between his parents' ch...

After receiving an anonymous tip, a policeman ( Edward Woodward ) travels to the Scottish island of Summerisle to search for a missing girl. When he arrives, the Islanders, most of whom seem to be practising pagans, claim to have never seen or heard of the young girl. The mystery leads to our pro...

Christmas 1183. An elderly King Henry the Second (Peter O'Toole) is torn over naming his successor. He wants the young Prince John (Nigel Terry), one of his three sons, to take over, however, his wife Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine (Katherine Hepburn) wants another of his sons, Prince Richard the Lio...

Peter Ustinov stars as Agatha Christie's immortal detective, Hercule Poirot, in this star-studded murder-mystery. Poirot is tying up some loose ends on a shimmeringly beautiful Adriatic island when he's dragged into the case of an actress' strangling. In typical Christie style, everyone on the be...

Menelik Shabazz’s pioneering first feature, shot around the communities of Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove, marked a coming of age for black British cinema. A love story that traces the emotional and political growth of a young black couple in Thatcher's London, it was the first British film to ...

Despite Harold Pinter's fear that Joseph Losey would turn his play into 'a completely homosexual picture', The Servant stands as one of the great critiques of British social and sexual mores. Power relationships between the classes fuel a sexual subtext about dominance and submission which goes b...

One of the greatest British films, Carol Reed's classic very consciously emphasises its time and place - post-war Vienna - yet its resonant themes around loss of innocence and a fall from grace render it timeless. Joseph Cotten plays the writer searching the Austrian capital for his missing frien...

Dennis Price plays Louis, a young man snubbed by his aristocratic family as a result of his mother's marriage. When she's killed, Louis becomes determined to inherit the family title, and won't let anything or anyone stop him. With an unforgettable performance by Alec Guinness as all eight remain...

The villagers of Cwmgiedd, southwest Wales, are the stars of Humphrey Jennings’ unforgettably inventive drama-doc. At Lidice, Czechoslovakia, a mining community’s entire male population was executed by the Nazis in 1942. Jennings (often said to be Britain’s greatest documentary filmmaker) i...

"The longest unsponsored advertisement ever to reach cinema screens", reckoned producer Monja Danischewski. Maybe so, but Alexander Mackendrick's debut feature is much more than that. This comic account of a real-life event pitches a priggish English army captain against the remorseless guile of ...

In the middle of World War II Cavalcanti provocatively imagined a postwar England in which the failure of the threatened German invasion could be safely seen in flashback, thanks to the resourceful villagers of Bramley End. Once the ostensibly British troops in their village are revealed as Nazis...

In post-war Britain following the detonation of an unexploded bomb the inhabitants of a London street discover riches and artefacts. These documents state that they are citizens of the medieval kingdom of Burgundy. When the government attempts to claim the fortune, the citizens of Burgundy declar...

After securing a job at his uncle's arms factory Stanley Windrush gets caught up in a dispute between the factory bosses and its trade union official. The Boulting Brothers' classic comedy brims with brilliant performances, including Ian Carmichael as the lovable Stanley and Dennis Price and Rich...

With his reign coming to an end, a dying Henry VIII looks back on his life and the six marriages that would go on to define him. The film looks back with the King, following his life from his marriage to a Spanish princess to the foundation of Protestantism, to the beheadings and divorces that wo...

Captain Anson (John Mills), a fledgeling alcoholic, and Tom Pugh (Harry Andrews) are ordered to escort two nurses across the North African desert. Encountering German troops, treacherous terrain, as well as an enigmatic man, Ice Cold in Alex is a British war film packed with adventure.

It is 1912, and the shadow of war looms over a wealthy family. As they celebrate their eldest daughter's engagement in their lavish Yorkshire manor, they're interrupted by an ominous police detective who is investigating a young woman's suicide, and what role each of them played in her death.

With a colonel constantly causing annoyance, a bumbling nurse, a budding romance between a patient and nurse, and a man obsessed with having his bunyon removed, Haven Hospital's new Matron (Hattie Jacques) has a lot of hard work ahead. As she goes on ruling with an iron fist, Oliver Reckitt (Kenn...