The 10 most underrated British movies
If you want to know about the true psyche of a nation, then look at how they present themselves in their own films. In the US you have a nation depicted as a vibrant expanse of hope and glory, in the UK you have a nation depicted as a grey slither of sloth and sodomy. If you’re feeling faint-hearted and in need of a film then you’d be best off swerving the British cinema section as a solid rule of thumb.
At times, this grimness can be overcooked even for a native of the north. The UK’s filmography has, at times, been swamped by a middle-class facsimile of humourless struggles, with funding going to the privileged to wallow in the supposed plight of their subjects. However, there are times when this grey assault is upended, and the brilliant absurdity of Blighty is brought to the fore.
This beautiful, odious isle is an oddity full of delights, despair and dichotomies primed for silver screen perusal. As a result, some of the most truly human films in history have been made here, devoid of any influencing pull beyond depicting the life of the lowly many. Nevertheless, given life’s true peculiarity, these humble gems can often puzzle the mainstream and head straight towards the cult doldrums synonymous with ‘underrated’.
While the likes of Withnail and I and Sexy Beast might break through, there are many other classics that peruse life as we know it that sit firmly under the heading of underrated. These are the films we have collated below. From the hilarity of Sightseers to the uncompromised darkness of Nil By Mouth, this slew of hidden gems captures the art without pretence that may well define the best output of Britain.
The 10 most underrated British movies:
A Room for Romeo Brass
Hilarity and casual horror run side-by-side in Shane Meadows’ brilliantly impartial films. At his best, as a director he approaches his movies without any preordained notions and as such he offers up a naturalist look at the highs and lows of bedlam. Thus, for all A Room for Romeo Brass might – on the whole – be about a lunatic casually wreaking havoc, it seems just like a casual lark for the most part.
The cherry on top of a splendid ensemble is Paddy Considine putting in one of the great British acting performances as the poetic madman, Morell. If the mark of a classic is how much it stays with you after the initial thrill, then I’ll be damned if I, and a slew of other fans, are not muttering ‘touch it’ and ‘one beat, two beat’ in an exaggerated Notts accent a few times a week.
Sightseers
It is an unspoken law of the universe that should you pass an occupied caravan at any given time there will be people in there either f–king or fighting—you can’t be sure which, but no intermediate state is known to exist. It is the Schrödinger’s principle of the ambulatory holiday. Inside those Fiberglass vacations, the essence of our lives are distilled down to a tacky tableau of sordid existence.
Sightseers is, in fact, abundant with unspoken laws of the universe: Those who walk with a stick at an age before it is medically necessary will inevitably be a tory wanker, hen-do encounters will always reap untold havoc, and, contrastingly, the rather more pronounced universal truth, violence only begets great violence. All these observations are etched out in the funniest possible way throughout the film. There is a certain amusement to the fact that pitifully dower places like a pencil museum exist in a place that William Wordsworth likened to God’s own garden, but it’s far funnier to inhabit that observation with the surrealist sight of a woman penning a murderous note with a three-foot pencil. Pairing relatability with this sort of madness and hysteric set pieces is why it is one of the greatest comedies, period.
There’s Only One Jimmy Grimble
Contrary to a lot of British cinematic output, football is not just fighting, and glory is indeed possible… even in the north. These simple realities are presented with glowing charm in There’s Only One Jimmy Grimble. It’s a film that captures both the childlike wonder and the pie and pints sentiment of the beautiful game.
In an almost fable-like tale, Grimble’s magic boots are woven into the northern equivalent of a Greek epic (so not that epic at all). It’s fun for the whole family and has enough heart to even win around football cynics. Above all, even when the final dream of randomly being plucked out of the terraces and introduced to the big stage as some sort of emergency sub has even evaporated, the movie can still summon some doe-eyed dreaminess out of you.
Nil By Mouth
To betray a personal opinion, Gary Oldman may well be the finest screen actor of recent times. Nevertheless, it’s an entirely different story behind the camera, but thankfully his writing / directing debut, Nil By Mouth, turned out to be a tour de force. Just like his acting, it is a mercurial and full-blooded affair, that beguiles and shocks in equal measure—lulling with subtlety and stinging with the uncompromised blows.
Ultimately, you are left with a film that is quite frankly horrific. It rolls along the English gutter without glee or glibness, just a stark look at how the lowest rung can make a bastard all the more brutal. And while it might not have much of an arc, there is something about the film that seems vital, using harsh grandeur to transfigure it from simple misery porn to a gruelling portent.
Another Year
Another Year is a meditative Mike Leigh film about the steady ebb and flow of time in flux and the friends and family we hold close amid its rapids. Put simply in a suitably casual summary: ‘It’s really chilled and pretty emotionally draining’. The crux of the teary pull is that it calls for you to address your own life along the way, calling out beyond the onscreen drama.
Complete with effecting performances by Jim Broadbent, Lesley Manville and Ruth Sheen, there is a consummate sense of class about the picture. Confidently constructed, this very human tale hides skill as well as Japanese joinery, creating a seamless unspooling of life in motion.
Submarine
Hollywood has often missed the main imperative of young love: the driving goal to lose your bloody virginity. Like hangovers and bank balances that are neither bust nor booming, the quest to break your sex duct is something that fiction has glossed over far too often, casting greasy teens as longing Lotharios without grappling with the central hardship and hurdle of doing that grand, mythologised thing.
Submarine tackles the matter with sweetness and style, throwing in the counterpoint of a marriage that is becoming decidedly sexless, and a stunning soundtrack by Alex Turner, to create an expressionist indie flick with a lot to say without ever screaming or stumbling—it just flows along at the typically serene pace of British storytelling in its strangely timeless and literary fashion.
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
A fresh-faced Albert Finney stars in Vic Reeves’ favourite film of all time, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, as a factory worker facing the fateful wrath of simply trying to get his end away. As it happens, the Alan Sillitoe novel that inspired it is also where the Arctic Monkeys picked up the title of their debut album.
The following quote from where the Arctic Monkeys’ title is derived should give you a fair flavour of the inherently realist film: “All I’m out for is a good time – all the rest is propaganda. I’m me and nobody else; and whatever people think or say I am, that’s what I’m not because they don’t know a bloody thing about me. Ay, by God, It’s a hard life if you don’t weaken, if you don’t stop the bastard government from grinding your face in the muck, though there ain’t much you can do about it unless you start making dynamite to blow their four-eyed clocks to bits.” On-screen that plays off as a charming, defiant and comic tale of simply getting by without too many thrills—save the shoot-outs for Hollywood.
Local Hero
Local Hero is a 1983 Bill Forsyth film that depicts the story of an American oil company who send an executive to buy up an entire village, however, to use the most ubiquitous phrase in synopsis history, ‘things don’t go as planned’. On this occasion, cinema’s classic ‘dilemma’ segment unravels with a joyous sense of originality.
All the while, the elemental core of the film is still a classic tale attracting typically endearing descriptions like ‘full of heart’ and ‘surprisingly emotive’. Beyond those slightly subverted cliches, the triumph of the film is that it plays beautifully with what it has—with Mark Knopfler’s soundtrack slowly soaring from the humble hills, it eventually induces that rarefied diamond in British cinema: pride—and it proves a strange beast to grapple with like the bewildering upswell of the Grinch experiencing kindness.
The Ladykillers
Geriatrics of the world rejoice, for once cinema hasn’t portrayed you as hunched nobodies well passed the draw of the main story. In fact, it’s thrown the rule book into the fire and cast you as a clan of comic psychos. All you need to know beyond that is that the Coen brothers saw fit to recreate this feature… and even those – the modern masters of storytelling – failed to capture the wacky wonder of this splendidly daft lark.
Alas, the triumph is not in the trivial humour, but rather the scything look into human nature that this film secretly serves up. It is a Shakespearean comic tragedy provided that Shakespeare had subsequently developed a better sense of humour. Above all, neither the psychology nor the laughs refuse to budge for each other, covertly holding hands in the cover of darkness, galvanizing each other into a lucrative alloy rarely seen in fiction.
Shallow Grave
Danny Boyle proves once again with this epic that all you really need to make a great film is a bag of money at the centre of the plot. There are so many tales you can tell with a suitcase of cash and Shallow Grave just happens to be one of the most stylish around. It sleekly fleshes out this simple diegesis with keenly pondered musings.
That style is seemingly achieved by Boyle’s understated brilliance of getting everyone on the same page. A cohesive cast and crew might not be a feat that makes its way onto the poster but you can feel it in every detail of this perfectly realised picture—and it is an alchemy that lifts it from a potentially ‘seen-it-before’ affair to a very effective height.
