The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

Honourable Mentions: Collateral, Man on Fire, Spider-Man 2

Edgar Wright's seminal Cornetto Trilogy packed three distinct flavours of genre-bending comedy, taking on the horror, action and sci-fi genres with an irreverent British glint that gradually disintegrated into something a bit more vulnerable and sensitive by the third act. Wright and co-writer and star Simon Pegg perfected this art from the off with 2004's Shaun of the Dead, a Young Frankenstein-tier comedy that drew strength from its affection for the horror genre - primarily the zombie films of George A. Romero.

The genius conceit of Shaun of the Dead - much like its successors, Hot Fuzz and The World's End - lies in its juxtaposition. The contrast between the bizarre quaintness of 21st-century Britain and the Hollywood spectacle of genre cinema is brutal, but also thoroughly charming in its lack of pretence. There's no denial that Britain is a weird island full of weird little guys, but this also yields an idiosyncratic kind of payoff, where everything from the British stiff-upper-lip to New Labour-era millennial existentialism feeds into the emotional ructions of each film's conclusion, but especially in Shaun of the Dead.

Wright has undeniably grown as a director in the 21 years since Shaun of the Dead landed, but just as the film's zombie flesh eaters peel away the skin of their victims to get to the gooey insides underneath, so too does the story open up something unexpectedly raw and affecting. The comedy is wonderfully staged and scripted, obviously, but the emotional drama of a man's quarter-life crisis leading to his own kind of reanimation is wonderfully drawn and at times upsettingly tangible.

The very best of zombie fiction has long used the undead for the purposes of metaphor, and Shaun of the Dead is no exception. Wright and Pegg made a wonderful tribute to their idols, but one that's so good that it sits alongside those works, as opposed to paying fealty underneath them.