Every Once Upon A Time Movie Ranked Worst To Best

One of the more prosaic locations to get the Once Upon A Time treatment, this Nottinghamshire-set comedy has a lighter touch than most on this list. Indeed its borrowing of Leone's title format (and a musical score with pastichey nods to Ennio Morricone) mostly exists as an ironic juxtaposition of the mundanity of the day-to-day existence of ordinary folk in the Midlands and the epic grandeur of the cinematic Old West.

Here the tough guy riding into town to reclaim his woman is Robert Carlyle as a general wrong'un incapable of handling the "love of his life" (an endearing Shirley Henderson) getting proposed to by another man on a trashy TV talk show.

Director Shane Meadows would follow Once Upon A Time In The Midlands with the brutal Dead Man's Shoes and richly drawn coming-of-age story This Is England. Compared to those two modern British classics, ...Midlands feels like a less significant work and one that is often overlooked.

It may be more lightweight than Meadows's other work, but that does not mean this is not a well observed and emotionally satisfying story with a strong ensemble as the sprawling dysfunctional family at the movie's heart.