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Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994)
7.1/10on IMDb
Released
The hit that opened the period, and the template Richard Curtis would refine for the rest of the decade. Hugh Grant's stammering, apologetic charm turned him into a star, and the film dominated the 1995 BAFTAs, taking best film, best director for Mike Newell and best actor for Grant.
The set pieces at the weddings are still very funny and the ensemble is a joy. What has dated is the world it treats as ordinary: a swish Britain of country churches and wedding tents in the well-off counties around London, which now looks like a fantasy of one very narrow slice of the country. Start here to see where the boom began.
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Shallow Grave (1994)
7.2/10on IMDb
Released
Danny Boyle's first feature, from an original script by John Hodge, is a nasty, gleeful thriller about three Edinburgh roommates who find their new roommate dead beside a pile of cash. It is where a then-unknown Ewan McGregor first showed the cocky charm Trainspotting would make famous, and it won the BAFTA for best British film.
Watch it for the way the friendship rots scene by scene; the apartment itself does more work than any chase. It is lean, cruel and darkly funny, and it has aged better than many bigger films of the decade. The team behind it would go on to define the era's next two years.
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Trainspotting (1996)
8.1/10on IMDb
Released
If one film stands for the era, it is this. Boyle and Hodge took Irvine Welsh's novel about Edinburgh heroin users and made something that moves like a music video without losing its bleakness. It took around £48 million against a budget of about £1.5 million, proof that a hard British subject could be a hit.
The soundtrack is a period document in its own right: it opens on Iggy Pop and runs through Blur, Pulp, Primal Scream and Underworld. Some of the shock now plays as swagger, but the pace, the voiceover and the ensemble still land. If you only watch one film from this list, make it this one.
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Brassed Off (1996)
7.2/10on IMDb
Released
The angriest of the decade's comedies from the north of England about lost work. Mark Herman's film follows a colliery brass band, the band of a coal-mining town, as their Yorkshire mine faces closure, drawing on the South Yorkshire mining community of Grimethorpe, with Pete Postlethwaite as the band's proud conductor, Danny.
The jokes are warm and the romance around Gloria and her flugelhorn is sweet, but the film never pretends the closures are anything other than a disaster. Its Italian title, Grazie, signora Thatcher, tells you how it played abroad. Pair it with The Full Monty for the full picture of what the boom years left behind.
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Twin Town (1997)
6.7/10on IMDb
Released
With Trainspotting's Danny Boyle and Andrew Macdonald as executive producers, Kevin Allen's Swansea comedy follows the Lewis brothers, a pair of joyriding hustlers known as the twins, as a feud with a local big shot spirals out of control. Rhys Ifans plays one brother opposite his real brother, Llyr, credited as Llyr Evans.
It is crude, profane and far rougher than its stablemate, and it drew criticism for its swearing and for how Swansea looked on screen. That is part of its value now: its anarchic energy catches a strand of the decade, small-town, Welsh and broke, that the London films never touch.
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Fever Pitch (1997)
6.7/10on IMDb
Released
Nick Hornby adapted his own best-selling memoir of soccer obsession into a romantic comedy, with Colin Firth as an English teacher whose devotion to Arsenal strains a new relationship with a colleague. It arrived just as following English soccer was turning from a working-class habit of the standing terraces into something people talked about at dinner parties, and it catches that shift with real affection.
Firth is likable and the north London fandom rings true, though the romance is the thinner half; the film comes alive whenever the season does. Pick this, not the 2005 American remake, which swapped Arsenal for the Boston Red Sox.
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The Full Monty (1997)
7.2/10on IMDb
Released
Peter Cattaneo's comedy about laid-off Sheffield steelworkers who put on a strip show became the decade's great crowd-pleaser and traveled the world. Robert Carlyle leads as Gaz, with Tom Wilkinson and Mark Addy in a superb ensemble written by Simon Beaufoy.
The scene in the line at the unemployment office, the "dole queue" in British slang, where the men cannot help moving to Hot Stuff is still one of the best gags in British comedy. Under the laughs the film is frank about unemployment, pride and fatherhood, which is why it has dated far less than many lighter hits of the period. Anne Dudley's score won the Oscar for original musical or comedy score.
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Face (1997)
6.6/10on IMDb
Released
The most direct link on this list between the Britpop charts and the screen: Blur's Damon Albarn made his acting debut in Antonia Bird's London heist thriller. Robert Carlyle plays a disillusioned former socialist turned armed robber, with Ray Winstone beside him, and the job goes bloodily wrong.
Critics were divided, so come for the period rather than a polished thriller. Its politics and its grief set it apart from the cheeky crime capers that followed Lock, Stock, and it makes a useful antidote to the decade's macho gangster films.
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Nil by Mouth (1997)
7.3/10on IMDb
Released
Gary Oldman's only feature as director is the hardest watch here and one of the best. Ray Winstone plays a violent, drinking husband in working-class South London and Kathy Burke his wife, a performance that won her the best actress award at Cannes.
There is nothing of Cool Britannia's sheen in it: this is the same decade seen from the other end of the city, with the rawest dialogue of any film on the list. It is not for an easy night on the couch, but it is essential for understanding what the glossier hits left out.
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Spice World (1997)
3.8/10on IMDb
Released
The Spice Girls zip around London in a double-decker tour bus in a film that is less a story than a celebration of the band at its peak, released for Christmas 1997. It is silly, proudly ramshackle and not good cinema by any normal measure, and even fans watch it with a grin rather than a straight face.
It earns its place as a time capsule. No other film catches Girl Power at its height so shamelessly, or shows so clearly how big British pop had become in those years. Watch it with people who remember buying the singles.
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Sliding Doors (1998)
6.7/10on IMDb
Released
Peter Howitt's first feature splits one woman's London life in two at the moment she either slips through the closing doors of a train or misses it, then follows both versions side by side. Gwyneth Paltrow plays Helen, and John Hannah is a delight as the chatty, Monty Python-quoting stranger she meets on board.
It is the neatest example of the era's transatlantic romantic comedies, with a Hollywood star in a very British setting. The late turns lean more toward soap opera than philosophy, but the two-track structure is still a pleasure to follow and easy to recommend to anyone who has never seen it.
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Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998)
8.1/10on IMDb
Released
Guy Ritchie's debut is the film that launched a hundred imitations. A crooked card game leaves four friends with a huge debt, and their plan to rob the gang next door sets off a chain of double-crosses told with freeze frames, nicknames and a cast of hard faces, Jason Statham among the four friends and the former soccer player Vinnie Jones stomping heads.
It is still fizzy and very funny, and it took Cool Britannia into the gutter with obvious glee. The wave of tawdry gangster films that followed has made its tricks look more familiar than they did in 1998, so watch the original before any of its copies.
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Elizabeth (1998)
7.4/10on IMDb
Released
The decade's period drama with attitude. Shekhar Kapur tells the story of the young Elizabeth I's rise to the throne as a dark, paranoid power struggle, closer to a conspiracy thriller than a costume piece, and it stands with Jude and The Wings of the Dove among the era's anti-heritage films, which pushed back against polite, nostalgic costume drama.
Cate Blanchett's commanding lead brought her first Oscar nomination, and the film won the Oscar for makeup. Choose it if the rest of this list feels too macho or too contemporary: it shows the same confidence turned on the national past, and it still feels sharp next to the stiffer costume dramas of the time.
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Still Crazy (1998)
7.0/10on IMDb
Released
Written by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, who also scripted The Commitments, Brian Gibson's comedy tries to re-form Strange Fruit, a middling late-1970s rock band, in the nervous late 1990s. Bill Nighy is the scene-stealer as the band's struggling, vain singer, with Timothy Spall on drums and Jimmy Nail on bass.
It is the gentlest film here and a little predictable, a reminder that the decade's revival culture looked backward as often as forward. For anyone who has played in a band or worked with one, the bickering, backstage vanity and second chances ring very true.
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Little Voice (1998)
7.0/10on IMDb
Released
Mark Herman followed Brassed Off with this fable set in the English seaside town of Scarborough, about a shy young woman who barely speaks but can sing like the divas on her late father's records. Jane Horrocks performs her uncanny Judy Garland tributes herself, live, and the moment she finally takes the stage is a genuine showstopper.
Michael Caine is splendidly seedy as the small-time agent who sees money in her, and the faded seaside resort does a lot of quiet work. Theatrical in places, it is less a portrait of 1990s Britain than a warm tribute to the old-fashioned showbiz the decade was leaving behind.
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Notting Hill (1999)
7.2/10on IMDb
Released
Richard Curtis closed the decade with a second Hugh Grant romance, this time about a west London bookstore owner whose quiet life is upended by a famous American actress, played by Julia Roberts, with Roger Michell directing. Together with Four Weddings it took some $600 million worldwide.
It is glossier and more Hollywood than its predecessor, and its picture of London is very tidy indeed, but the comic timing is sharp and Roberts plays the star with real wit. Watch it as the bookend to Four Weddings: the same formula, now polished for the whole world.
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Human Traffic (1999)
7.1/10on IMDb
Released
Justin Kerrigan's debut follows five Cardiff friends from the Friday escape from dead-end jobs through a weekend of clubbing to the Monday comedown. It is the film to watch for late-1990s rave culture, with a soundtrack featuring Fatboy Slim, Orbital and Matthew Herbert and early turns from John Simm and Danny Dyer.
Some of the fourth-wall gags and talking-to-camera bits have aged, but its affection for its characters and its honesty about why people went out every weekend still feel right. It has become a cult favorite for good reason, and it is the warmest film here about being young.
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East Is East (1999)
6.9/10on IMDb
Released
Ayub Khan-Din adapted his own stage play about a Pakistani father and his British-raised children in 1971 Salford, and Damien O'Donnell's film won the BAFTA for best British film. Om Puri is formidable as George Khan, the fish-and-chip shop owner trying to impose tradition on a family that increasingly sees itself as British, with Linda Bassett as his English wife.
It is set two decades before the Britpop years, but it belongs here because it widened the picture of who British films were about. The comedy is broad and fast, and the darker scenes hit harder than the poster suggests, so expect more than a feel-good family farce.
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