Best Films - British films - Romance

British cinema: Romance (Page 1 of 3)

A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929)

Anthony Asquith

One night, a convict escapes from Dartmoor prison and races across open countryside towards a remote farm cottage. Unaware of the trouble that is coming her way, the young woman inside this solitary building is putting her child to bed. The man enters the cottage and confronts the woman, who realises in an instant what is to be her fate... [More...]

A Fish Called Wanda (1988)

Charles Crichton

London gangster George Thomason has masterminded the perfect jewel robbery, which he is about to put into action with his henchman Ken Pile, an animal-lover with a crippling stutter, and a pair of Americans - Wanda Gerschwitz and Otto West. The latter pretend to be brother and sister but are in fact lovers who intend to double-cross George and Ken after the robbery... [More...]

A Matter of Life and Death (1946)

Michael Powell

During WWII, an RAF fighter pilot Peter Carter is returning to England after a raid over Germany when his plane is hit. Realising his has no parachute, he sends one last radio message, which is received by a young American radio operator, June, before bailing out to certain death. Miraculously, he survives and wakes up to find himself on a beach in the south of England, where he meets June and falls in love with her... [More...]

A Tale of Two Cities (1958)

Ralph Thomas

In 1775, the banker Jarvis Lorry travels to Paris to be reunited with his old friend, Dr Alexandre Manette, who has been held prisoner in the Bastille for the last eighteen years. Dr Manette is revived from his near-catatonic state when he sets eyes on his daughter Lucie and the pair leave for England to start a new life together... [More...]

A Town Like Alice (1956)

Jack Lee

In 1942, Jean Paget is working in Malaya when the Japanese army begins to attack the country. In no time, she ends up with a party of women and children who are instructed to walk fifty miles to Kuala Lumpur, where they will be allowed to leave the country for Singapore. Before they reach their destination, the party is halted by more Japanese soldiers and sent in another direction... [More...]

The African Queen (1951)

John Huston

In 1914, Rose Sayer assists her brother, the Reverend Samuel Sayer, in leading a missionary village in German East Africa. Their supplies are brought to them by Canadian Charlie Allnut on his steam-driven barge, The African Queen. The Sayers disregard Charlie’s advice to leave the village now that Germany is at war with England and decide to stay on... [More...]

Alfie (1966)

Lewis Gilbert

Alfie likes women, he likes them a lot. In fact, you could say that women are his main interest in life, his raison d’être so to speak. However, he’d rather leap stark naked into a bubbling volcano than get himself shackled to the same woman for the rest of his life. To him, a woman is like a hire car... [More...]

An American Werewolf in London (1981)

John Landis

David Kessler and Jack Goodman are two American college backpackers who decide to make a tour of Europe. Where better to begin than the bleak, soggy Yorkshire moors? As night falls, they enter an inn named The Slaughtered Lamb, hoping for rest and refreshment. Instead, they receive a deathly cold reception from a sinister collection of locals who, not liking foreign folk, drive them away with a warning not to stray on the moors... [More...]

Anne of the Thousand Days (1969)

Charles Jarrott

England, 1525. King Henry VIII is anxious to produce a male heir to secure the Tudor lineage but his queen, Katherine of Aragon, has passed child-bearing age and has borne him only a daughter and dead sons. Anne, the 18-year-old daughter of the courtier Sir Thomas Boleyn, makes such an impression on Henry that he resolves to make her his mistress... [More...]

Billy Liar (1963)

John Schlesinger

Billy Fisher is 19, lives with his parents in a glum north English town and works as a desk clerk for a firm of undertakers. He retreats from the boredom of his everyday existence into his own dream world, Ambrosia, where he is the leader of a great militaristic nation. Billy is also a compulsive liar and now tries to convince everyone that he has been offered a job writing gags for the famous comedian Danny Boon... [More...]

Brief Encounter (1945)

David Lean

Each Thursday, housewife Laura Jesson treats herself to a day in the nearby town of Milford, to do some shopping and watch a film at the cinema. Afterwards, she takes the train back to her comfortable suburban home where her husband and two children await her. It’s a drab life but Laura is not unhappy... [More...]

The Captive Heart (1946)

Basil Dearden

In August 1940, a German prisoner-of-war camp receives a fresh intake of captured British soldiers. These include Captain Hasek, a Czech soldier who, after escaping from a Nazi concentration camp, stole the uniform and papers from a dead British soldier named Captain Mitchell. The other soldiers grow suspicious of Hasek because of his ability to speak German fluently but the Czech wins them around and convinces them that if his true identity is discovered he will be executed by the Nazis... [More...]

Carry on Nurse (1959)

Gerald Thomas

Ted York and Bernie Bishop are the latest admissions to a men’s ward in a busy London hospital, the former a reporter with appendicitis, the latter a boxer with a fractured hand. Their ward brothers include Oliver Reckitt, an aspiring nuclear physicist, Percy Hickson, who fell off a scaffold, and Jack Bell, a man whose bunion is ruining his love life... [More...]

The Edge of the World (1937)

Michael Powell

Two tourists holidaying in the Hebrides land on the deserted island of Hirta. Their guide Andrew Gray explains that until a decade ago there was a thriving community on the island. Encountering a gravestone with the name Peter Manson at the top of a sharp drop into the sea, Gray reveals that he was one of the islanders, once engaged to a girl named Ruth, Manson’s daughter... [More...]

Far from the Madding Crowd (1967)

John Schlesinger

Rural England, in the early 1800s. Gabriel Oak, a humble sheep farmer in the county of Wessex, is in love with Bathsheba Everdene, a proud, independently minded young woman who lives with her aunt. After Bathsheba rejects his offer of marriage, Gabriel suffers a second blow when one of his sheepdogs drives his flock of sheep over the edge of a cliff... [More...]

The Farmer’s Wife (1928)

Alfred Hitchcock

For some time, farmer Samuel Sweetland has been without a wife. On the day of his daughter’s wedding, he decides it is time that he re-married. The prospect of a future alone without a good woman by his side is unbearable. So, with the help of his faithful housekeeper, Minta, he draws up a list of eligible middle-aged spinsters... [More...]

From Russia with Love (1963)

Terence Young

Working for the international crime syndicate SPECTRE, chess grandmaster Kronsteen has devised a foolproof plan to steal the Lektor decoding machine from the Russians. Not only will the theft worsen Anglo-Soviet relations, it will also allow SPECTRE to eliminate James Bond, the troublesome British agent who dispatched one of the organisation’s key operatives, Dr No... [More...]

The Ghost Goes West (1935)

René Clair

In 18th Century Scotland, there is only one thing that the McLaggan and Glourie clans hate more than the English, and that is each other. On his deathbed, Old Glourie gets his only son, Murdoch, to swear that he will prove himself worthy of the Glourie name. Before he gets his chance to do this, Mudroch is killed in battle, dying a coward’s death... [More...]

The Go-Between (1970)

Joseph Losey

In the long hot summer of 1900, 12-year-old Leo Colston spends his holiday as a guest of his school friend Marcus Maudsley at the latter’s sprawling Norfolk estate. Leo comes from a comparatively modest background and so he finds it hard to fit into the Maudsleys’ privileged way of life. When Marcus is struck down with measles, Leo begins to take an interest in his older sister, Marian, and is coerced into delivering secret letters between her and a local farmer, Ted Burgess... [More...]

Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939)

Sam Wood

England, 1933. Although officially retired, Mr Chipping still maintains a visible presence at Brookfield School For Boys, a private school to which he has devoted 63 years of his adult life. One evening, sitting comfortably beside the fire in his room, he casts his mind back to the day he first arrived at the school, when he was a gauche 22-year-old eager to take up his post as Latin teacher... [More...]

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