The best films to watch on BBC iPlayer

Passport to Pimlico (1949)

One of the most endearingly quirky of all the Ealing comedies, Passport to Pimlico combines gentle eccentricity with a politely subversive spirit. The explosion of a Second World War bomb leads to the discovery of a document that reveals Pimlico in London to be a part of France. The locals, led by Stanley Holloway, gleefully set about erecting borders and imposing import duties. The British government doesn’t take kindly to this outbreak of Frenchness and sets up a blockade. Irreverent and spirited, this is a real treat.
Available until September 30

Jailhouse Rock (1957)

In his third film Elvis Presley plays Vince Everett, a construction worker who kills a man in a drunken brawl and ends up in the slammer. Vince’s cellmate is a washed-up country singer who teaches him a few chords on the guitar and convinces him to perform in an inmate show that is broadcast on TV. Vince gets fan letters, natch, and the rest of the film follows him as he heads to Hollywood and becomes a star after his release. The performance of the title track is widely cited as Presley’s finest onscreen moment.
Available until September 30

Molly’s Game (2017)

Aaron Sorkin’s drama is based on the 2014 memoir of the former competitive skier Molly Bloom who was arrested by the FBI in 2013 and charged with profiting from underground gambling —- she operated a high-stakes poker game in New York. Bloom, whose career was wrecked by a back injury, is played by Jessica Chastain, with Kevin Costner as her father.
Available until October 1

Get Carter (1971)

Has Michael Caine been cooler than he is as the London gangster investigating his brother’s death in Newcastle? Even naked he totes a shotgun with elan. Dismissed by many on release, Mike Hodges’s film was championed in the Nineties by Quentin Tarantino and Guy Ritchie, who filled their films with stylish brutality and pithy psychos. While the violence won’t raise eyebrows in 2022, the treatment of women may. These are not pleasant men, despite the repartee and sharp suits.
Available until October 1

Waves (2019)

A heartbreaking family melodrama wrapped inside a phosphorescent fever dream, this movie from Trey Edward Shults is extraordinary. From the opening shots of the teenage wrestling star Tyler (Kelvin Harrison Jr) hurtling down a Florida freeway, blissfully singing with his girlfriend, Alexis (Alexa Demie), you know that something horrible is going to happen. A full hour of high-tension home life passes before it does.
Available until October 2

Lady Macbeth (2016)

Florence Pugh plays a young Victorian bride bought by a dark, satanic colliery owner for his dissolute son. Pugh is superb, a powerful potion of rebellion, determination and lust. Despite the title, this is not Shakespearean drama, but a reinterpretation of Nikolai Leskov’s 1865 novella Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. The atmosphere on the wild and windy moors is more Brontë than anything. It was a breakout role for Pugh.
Available until October 6

How to Marry a Millionaire (1953)

Jean Negulesco’s rom-com has the triple delight of Marilyn Monroe, Lauren Bacall and Betty Grable in one film — and one apartment — as models who plan to marry for money in New York. Monroe plays the extremely short-sighted Pola Debevoise, who refuses to wear her Dame Edna Everage-style glasses in front of eligible men, which leads to endless light comedy. The ladies’ fashion, all shot in CinemaScope, is to die for, but Bacall’s ballsy performance as the leader of the pack is an added joy. Also, she smokes so beautifully.
Available until October 6

Judy (2019)

The formula is familiar: a glamorous yet emotionally fraught Hollywood star, possibly ageing, is plonked into rain-lashed Blighty and transformed, via lonely introspection and encounters with eccentric locals, into a more decent, honest, stable person. Think My Week with Marilyn, Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool or Stan & Ollie. What lifts it above the others is Renée Zellweger. As a frazzled, cash-strapped, late-era Garland arriving in London in 1968 to grab some high-paying stage gigs, Zellweger makes this one of the great film-star biopics.
Available until October 6

The Lavender Hill Mob (1951)

This is the classic Ealing comedy — a wonderfully disreputable little farce. Alec Guinness is the long-suffering bank clerk who plans the daring theft of the very bullion that he is paid to oversee, while Stanley Holloway is the souvenir manufacturer whose smelting equipment plays a vital role. The men cling to their decency and honesty even as they pull off an audacious gold heist. Sid James and Alfie Bass give sterling support as a pair of Cockney crooks who lend a hand.
Available until October 6

Respect (2021)

A fiercely charismatic turn from Jennifer Hudson lifts this seemingly conventional Aretha Franklin biopic to sublime places. Hudson’s “Queen of Soul” is the victim of a hard-knock life that includes childhood rape, domestic abuse and an all-consuming alcoholism that threatens to kill her career. The film is directed by Liesl Tommy (of the TV series Jessica Jones and The Walking Dead) with the restraint of someone who knows that the main draw is not flashy technique but the performance of the lead actress. Hudson’s dramatic work is impeccable, but her singing is transcendent.
Available until October 11

Alien (1979)

Ridley Scott’s second film remains a benchmark in horror and science fiction. The naturalism of the performances and the dialogue served only to accentuate the horror of the extraterrestrial game of cat-and-mouse. And in Sigourney Weaver it introduced an entirely new kind of female star — Warrant Officer Ellen Ripley is statuesque, quick-witted and the only crew member who is a match for the alien stowaway that hitches a ride in John Hurt’s chest. It was a career-defining role for Weaver — she went from jobbing stage player to overnight screen superstar. The ninth instalment in the franchise — Alien: Romulus — is in cinemas now.
Available until October 13

Operation Crossbow (1965)

“Crossbow” was the Second World War codename given to Anglo-American operations against German V-weapons (experimental rocket-bombs). Michael Anderson’s 1965 espionage thriller touches on the main aspects of a British undercover mission to destroy the German manufacturing facilities for these weapons. George Peppard is Lt John Curtis, one of the engineers who parachute into occupied Holland to take out a missile base — but there is a traitor in their midst. The cast includes Sophia Loren, who has a modest role as Curtis’s wife, despite being given lead billing to help increase box office receipts.
Available until October 14

The Outfit (2022)

The setting is Chicago in 1956, a mobsters’ menswear store run by a tailor called Leonard (Mark Rylance), a Cockney immigrant from Savile Row. The film opens with the camera roaming around the shop, where we meet dim-witted gangster Richie Boyle (Dylan O’Brien) and his ruthless sidekick Francis (Johnny Flynn). Richie toys with Leonard, whom he has nicknamed “English” and who is indebted to the patronage of Richie’s kingpin father (Simon Russell Beale). Within minutes Richie is sporting a gunshot wound and holding an FBI tape holding the identity of the soon-to-be murdered informant.
Available to October 20

The Big Sleep (1946)

This crime classic, adapted from the Raymond Chandler novel and directed by Howard Hawks, starts with a man and a woman in silhouette smoking over the credit sequence — a fair indicator of the stylish, moody noir to come. Humphrey Bogart plays the world-weary private detective Philip Marlowe, hired by the dying General Sternwood to look into a case of blackmailing. Marlowe’s investigation means tangling with Sternwood’s wayward daughters, including the “exacting, smart and ruthless” Vivian (Lauren Bacall). Three months after the film wrapped Bacall and Bogart were married.
Available to October 21

Northern Soul (2014)

Elaine Constantine is a longtime fan of northern soul, and it shows in each frame of her directorial debut, a buzzing love letter to the scene. It’s 1974 in Lancashire and a misfit loner finds his place in a youth movement that reveres obscure black American soul music from the 1960s. Elliot James Langridge brings a wiry conviction to the role of John, the bullied outcast who becomes one of the faces of the scene. It’s a film that mainlines the joyous complicity of being part of an underground youth movement.
Available to October 21

Pain and Glory (2019)

Pedro Almodòvar’s film is part biopic, part bizarre personality fusion, with Antonio Banderas playing a celebrated yet creatively stymied Spanish film-maker called Salvador Mallo. Mallo is alone in Madrid, in middle age, beset by physical ailments and hooked on painkillers and heroin. During Mallo’s drugged-out reveries, we drift back to his impoverished childhood with his loving mother (Penélope Cruz). Yet the genius of Almodòvar is that it builds to a shattering emotional payoff.
Available to October 23

The Railway Station Man (1992)

Shelagh Delaney, the playwright who produced her remarkable debut A Taste of Honey while still a teenager in 1958, adapted Jennifer Johnston’s 1984 novel. Set against the modern Irish Troubles, it follows the slow-burn relationship between a widow and a maimed American war veteran, who meet in a remote coastal village in Ireland where he is restoring the local railway station building. It reunited Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland more than 20 years after their memorable appearance in the film Don’t Look Now.
Available until February 2025

The Commitments (1991)

The first of Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown trilogy of novels, set in Dublin’s deprived northern suburbs, inspired the director Alan Parker’s big-hearted musical romp, which caused a minor sensation when it came out. More than 3,000 local musicians auditioned to be part of the ragged soul music band at the heart of Doyle’s rollicking rags-to-rags story. Before Andrew Strong turned up, the part of Deco was conceived for someone slim and sexy. Van Morrison was in line to play Joey the Lips, while Bronagh Gallagher holds the record jointly (with Joe Pesci in Goodfellas) for the most frequent use of the f-word in a film.
Available until February 2025

The History Boys (2006)

This adaptation of Alan Bennett’s award-winning play features the cast that starred in the original production at the National Theatre in London. The actors — including, in early roles, James Corden, Russell Tovey and Sacha Dhawan, as well as Andrew Knott and Dominic Cooper, — are grammar school boys aiming for Oxford University places. Richard Griffiths plays the controversial humanities master Hector; Stephen Campbell Moore is Irwin, the tutor brought in to whittle them into shape. This acerbic musing on class and education doesn’t quite escape its stage origins, but the joy is in the sparkling dialogue and savage repartee.
Available until April 2025

The Phantom of the Open (2021)

Imagine the Eddie the Eagle movie, only with golfing as the backdrop instead of ski jumping. And then imagine the Oscar winner Mark Rylance in the lead role, delivering another one of those idiosyncratic performances of tiny gestures, pauses, sighs and grimaces that somehow coalesce into a sympathetic marvel. He plays Maurice Flitcroft, a former crane operator who tricked his way into the British Open golf championship in 1976.
Available until May 2025

Mrs Dalloway (1997)

This adaptation of the novel by Virginia Woolf is carried by a fine performance from Vanessa Redgrave. An elegantly structured story of intersecting lives in London, 1923, it follows Clarissa Dalloway (Redgrave) as she goes flower shopping for a party she is hosting. Meanwhile, a young man (Rupert Graves) is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. And unexpectedly, Clarissa’s former suitor, returns from India. Mrs Dalloway relives a crucial moment from her past and her reasons for choosing this life, with her MP husband.
Available until June 2025

Red Dust (2004)

Set against the backdrop of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the first-time director Tom Hooper’s absorbing and well-acted legal drama stars Chiwetel Ejiofor as an ANC politician confronting the former apartheid policeman who tortured him, played by Jamie Bartlett. Hilary Swank co-stars as the locally born lawyer who returns from US exile to represent him.
Available for more than a year

Wildlife (2018)

Carey Mulligan gives a gripping and nuanced turn as the mother from heaven and hell in this startling directorial debut from the actor Paul Dano. Set in the early 1960s and adapted from the Richard Ford novel of the same name, it introduces us to Jeanette (Mulligan), a chipper housewife in rural Montana who dotes on her 14-year-old son, Joe (Ed Oxenbould), and dutifully tends to her embittered former golfer husband, Jerry (Jake Gyllenhaal). When a wildfire suddenly drags Jerry from the narrative (he joins an out-of-town firefighting unit), Jeanette seizes the moment to discover her true identity with a booze-fuelled affair and abandonment of the perfect-mom routine. You’ll root for Jeanette even as you flinch at her actions.
Available for more than a year

Nowhere Special (2020)

James Norton plays John, a window cleaner in Belfast who, in the final weeks of terminal brain cancer, embarks on a cross-country interview marathon with possible parents for his four-year-old son. The potential for melodrama is omnipresent, but the director Uberto Pasolini imbues the proceedings with a welcome “less is more” approach.
Available for more than a year

Aftersun (2022)

This astonishing feature debut from the Scottish director Charlotte Wells is a portrait of paternal love, its protean nature and the lingering impact it leaves on adult life. The film pivots around two grounded turns from Paul Mescal and the 12-year-old newcomer Frankie Corio. They’re a Scottish father and daughter, Calum and Sophie, on holiday in a cheap Turkish resort in the late 1990s, and burdened by an urgent mission to connect and compensate for his apparent absence from her life.
Available until February 2025

A Simple Plan (1998)

Tonally similar to the Coen brothers’ Fargo, Sam Raimi’s tense thriller has an impressive body count. Hank Mitchell (Bill Paxton) and his slow-witted brother Jacob (Billy Bob Thornton) stumble on a crashed plane deep in the woods. Inside is the body of the pilot and a bag containing $4 million. The men decide to hide the money until the plane wreck is discovered with the spring thaw. Then, if nobody notices, they will split the cash. The plan seems simple enough, but things have a habit of getting messy …
Available for more than a year

Twelve Monkeys (1995)

One of Terry Gilliam’s darkest films, this dystopian time-travelling science-fiction film stars Bruce Willis as the convict James Cole. The year is 2035 and Cole has been offered parole. The catch is, he has to travel back in time to thwart a killer disease that has wiped out most of humanity and sent the survivors underground to shelter from the now-poisoned air. Unfortunately, when he arrives in the past, shortly before the onset of the plague, nobody believes him and he finds himself incarcerated in a secure mental unit. Gilliam’s direction is abrasive but it gels brilliantly with the disorientating material. Brad Pitt co-stars as the insane son of Christopher Plummer’s eminent scientist.
Available for more than a year

Citizen Kane (1941)

At the age of 25 Orson Welles directed his first film, which he co-wrote, produced and starred in, demonstrating an audaciously precocious and fully formed talent. While it is extraordinary to think that this is a directorial debut, the scope of the ambition is such that perhaps only a newcomer to the medium, not used to the compromises that are an integral part of film-making, would have attempted it. The story starts with the death of the newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane (Welles) — loosely based on William Randolph Hearst — on his Florida estate. He utters a final word: “Rosebud.” A reporter interviews friends of the great man to try to unravel its meaning. Genuinely innovative film-making.
Available for more than a year

Man on the Moon (1999)

Milos Forman’s biopic of the actor and avant-garde comedian Andy Kaufman is driven by a revelatory performance from Jim Carrey, who seems to channel the late Kaufman’s anarchic spirit to such an extent that it’s a little uncomfortable to watch. Unpredictable, bizarre and baffling, Kaufman would appear on stage in numerous incarnations, including the self-declared “intergender wrestling champion of the world”. The film is rather more conventional. Still, there’s no question that Forman and Carrey are striving to capture the spirit of the man.
Available for more than a year

King Kong (1933)

Your name is Merian C Cooper. You’re a 38-year-old former First World War bomber pilot turned movie producer. It’s two years into the Great Depression and you want to make a cinematic splash. So what do you do? Social commentary? Crime flick? Nope. You shoot a film about a giant ape who likes beating up dinosaurs and has a thing for blondes. You make it for $670,000, call it King Kong, and the rest is blockbuster history. Yet the beauty of Kong is in its ramshackle simplicity. The story of a 25ft ape who’s dragged from the jungles of Indonesia to the streets of New York is told via an 18in-tall rubber gorilla covered in rabbit fur, surrounded by recycled props and shot on recycled sets. Somehow all these elements combine into a timeless classic.
Available for more than a year

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