British Film - The Alternate Top 25

Accident
Dirk Bogarde, Harold Pinter and Joseph Losey are the weighty triumvirate behind this lingeringly powerful melodrama. Pain and passion under the Oxford sun as a household of brilliant but brittle 1960s intellectuals confront murder, failure and unrequited love. A cruel summer indeed.
Jon Fortgang

Adam & Paul
Slapstick gets smack-sick. This none-more-black comedy about two heroin-addled junkies stumbling through Dublin in search of 'whatsisname' is poignant, poetic and more authentically grimy than a dozen 1990s drug-chic dramas. Yup, it's Trainspotting via Samuel Beckett.
Jon Fortgang

Babylon
Aswad's Brinsley Forde is magnificent as sound system DJ Blue in this incendiary drama about the black British experience circa 1980, from the writer of Quadrophenia. Superb soundtrack too, featuring the likes of Yabby U, I Roy and Aswad's classic 'Warrior Charge' ("Lion, lion!").
Ali Catterall

Becket
Richard Burton and Peter O'Toole square off in this great - largely forgotten - historical drama. Why is it so overlooked? Hard to say, although it might have something to do with this most British of stories - Thomas Becket Vs. Henry II - being written by a Frenchman, Edward Anhalt.
Richard Luck

Bleak Moments
Excruciating sexual inarticulacy and a depiction of listless suburban London life in the early 1970s make this our choice for the obligatory Mike Leigh drama. Watch the scene in the Chinese restaurant and squirm.
Matthew De Abaitua

Next page • The Alternate 25 continues - from Blood On Satan's Claw to Flash Gordon