66 Essential British Films To Take Your Mind Off The World Cup

7. The Long Good Friday (1980)

As with Get Carter before it The Long Good Friday is a British Gangster film that's influence is so far reaching it has long been touted as a candidate for the remake treatment. That this hasn't yet come to pass is a good thing considering Death Race and Resident Evil helmer Paul W. S. Anderson had plans to relocate the story to Miami (because Americanising Get Carter worked out so well). Latterly The Long Good Friday has also been discussed as a TV series with Ray Winstone, a slightly more agreeable approach, but it would have to go some way to match the grimy, politically charged brutality of the original classic.

6. A Clockwork Orange (1971)

If it wasn't for bootleg videos converted from NTSC to PAL then a whole generation would have been denied the chance to watch Stanley Kubrick's brutal adaptation of Anthony Burgess's seminal subculture novel at the time it was appropriate to their age. Clockwork Orange's director-imposed ban only added to the mystique of the film though and despite Kubrick's wishes Alex and his little Droogies continue to inspire young audiences. However not in the way Kubrick feared by inciting ultraviolence but rather through its iconographic visual splendour and its dissection of political themes, individuality, free-will and government sponsored mind control. Despite its seventies-vision-of-the-future trappings it continues to be more relevant with every passing year.

5. The Wicker Man (1973)

Few films before or since have tapped into Britain's history of folklore and Pagan ritual as effectively as The Wicker Man. It is a film that is at turns horrifying and blackly comic. It manages to be a horror film, a musical and a detective mystery all at the same time, without ever being singularly definable as such. Its influence endures to this day, and aside from the dismal remake and inferior sequel: The Wicker Tree, can be seen in films as diverse as Hot Fuzz, Kill List and Shutter Island to name a few.