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

58. The Scouting Book For Boys (2009)

The feature film directorial debut of This is England '86's Tom Harper is a haunting exploration of teenage fantasy, painfully unrequited desire, and how it can lead to disaster if not properly checked. This is England's Thomas Turgoose stars as David, a Norfolk teenager who lives on a Caravan park and spends his summer's hanging out with Holliday Grainger's Emily. Emily is a free spirited teen who as David discovers is having an affair with older man Steve, played by Rafe Spall. Every frame is beautifully shot, evoking the hazy beauty and smells and sounds of the height of British Summertime, in a way which intensifies rather than masks the sense of foreboding.

57. Fish Tank (2009)

Like Scouting Book for Boys, Fish Tank has been unjustly categorised as an example of a new miserabilism creeping into British cinema. It's true that Fish tank takes place in the concrete jungle council estates so familiar from the British social-realist milieu, and contains characters as ugly and repellent as its settings but like the work of Loach, Leigh and Meadows before it, Fish Tank explores individual resilience in the face of abject hopelessness, a trait anyone in working class Britain can be truly proud to identify with.

56. Sightseers (2012)

Ben Wheatley's third film, and the second of three films featured on this list, a testament to the vigorous ingenuity and originality with which he has announced himself. Sightseers is as bleak and as black a comedy as you will find. A psychopathic riff on Mike Leigh's Nuts in May, Sightseers is another of Wheatley's explorations into the isolation and horror that resides in the depths of the British psyche. A quintessentially British film in many ways but one which also manages to evoke the work of Asian directors like Takashi Miike, Tetsuya Nakashima and Shion Sono to create another idiosyncratic Wheatley film.