PFĬast Lorraine Stanley, Johnny Harris, Georgia Groome 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.
It’s a gory, funny trip, as Price dons a series of preposterous disguises to entrap his victims through their own foibles. 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’. As Edward Lionheart, Price plays a ham passed over for the award he most cherishes: Best Actor as voted by the Critics’ Circle.
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.
If we must find some connection, let it be the upnote of hope at the end, when the film’s final word is not ‘help’ but rather ‘hello’.Ĭast Vincent Price, Diana Rigg, Ian Hendry (Cillian Murphy is particularly soulful as a bike courier who awakens from a coma in an abandoned London, the world as he knew it fully decimated in less than a month.) That makes it particularly tempting to draw parallels to our current pandemic-stricken world. The characters aren’t just meaty automatons who only exist to be disembowelled - they seem like actual, flesh-and-blood humans desperate to stay that way. But there’s a humanistic quality in Boyle’s direction unique to the dark, dour canon of post-apocalyptic horror. That’s not to say it skimps on scares to the contrary, it includes some of the most horrifying set pieces of the last two decades.
And yet, it feels quite unlike any zombie movie before or since, to the degree that it nearly exists outside the genre. Nothing about 28 Days Later, frankly, is especially novel. Oh no, not fast zombies! Those are the worst kind! Danny Boyle didn’t invent the concept of speedy flesheaters, nor the idea of setting a zombie outbreak in the UK. 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. ? The 100 best movies of the 20th century so farĬast 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, Matthew Singer & Phil de Semlyen Here are the 100 greatest British films ever made. The results are as diverse as the country itself. To put together this list of the best British movies of all-time, we polled over 150 actors, directors, writers, producers, critics and industry heavyweights, from the likes of Wes Anderson, Mike Leigh, Ken Loach, Sam Mendes and Terence Davies, David Morrissey, Sally Hawkins and Thandie Newton. Thrillers? Romantic period pieces? Sci-fi? Drug movies? You can find them, all with a specific, if sometimes intangible, English slant.
Prefer a smaller scale, more intimate drama? Try Joanna Hogg or Shane Meadows. Want a sweeping, heart-swelling epic? Explore the films of David Lean or Powell and Pressburger. Other than location and accent, what signatures mark British cinema? Honestly, it’s hard to peg, if only because the UK movies industry hardly seems limited in the stories it tells and the cinematic experiences it puts onscreen.