"You've played a lot of fat slobs, haven't you?", asked Jonathan Ross when he invited Timothy Spall onto his chat show The Last Resort (Channel 4, 1987). The rotund, jowly Spall could only agree, ...

A disparate group of campers band together to rid themselves of hippies planning an all-night rave next to their site. The dramatic contrast between the enclosed, static and make-believe logic of ...

Free Cinema is now acknowledged as a highly influential moment in British cinema history, which not only re-invigorated British documentary in the 1950s but also served as a precursor to the British ...

There was certain inevitability that Sydney Tafler would be found playing the title role in Wide Boy (d. Ken Hughes, 1952). In British films of the late 1940s, 50s and 60s, Tafler was most likely to ...

Better than any other genre, social realism has shown us to ourselves, pushing the boundaries in the effort to put the experiences of real Britons on the screen, and shaping our ideas of what British ...

Footage courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife... Their cuts produce a faster-paced story, intended to engage contemporary ...

How a few graphic horror films led to the introduction of video censorship Many of these videos were identical to the cinema versions approved (often after cuts) by the British Board of Film Censors, ...

When a London crime syndicate loses its spoils to three Australian crooks impersonating police officers, its members decide to co-operate with the police in an attempt to catch the frauds. The set-up ...

If English-born Peter Ustinov, of Russian parentage, seems to have been around forever, this is only because he has.

This Happy Breed was David Lean's first official credit as solo director, and the most successful film of 1944. It was adapted from Noël Coward's hit stage play (the title comes from Shakespeare's ...

Low, Rachael, The History of the British Film, 1918-1929 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1971) Low, Rachael, The History of the British Film, 1929-1939 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985) ...