The best films to watch on BBC iPlayer

Licorice Pizza (2021)

For Paul Thomas Anderson’s “most personal film yet” he lavishly recreates slices of the late 1960s/early 1970s California of his childhood. It is built on the romantic tension between Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman, son of Philip Seymour Hoffman), a 15-year-old wannabe entrepreneur, and Alana Kane (Alana Haim), a 25-year-old photographer’s assistant. The pair are dropped into a gruellingly episodic narrative that moves in distracted fits and starts.
Available until July 25

Cyrano (2022)

Joe Wright’s Cyrano de Bergerac adaptation is a musical with knockout tunes, based on the stage musical by Erica Schmidt. Its Cyrano is without a huge honker but is instead diminutive in stature and played by Peter Dinklage. His Roxanne is played by Haley Bennett, and her Christian is no longer the dumb suitor but a soft and sympathetic innocent. Wright sticks closely to the source material. It’s beautifully done.
Available until July 30

My Week with Marilyn (2011)

This solid biopic is based on the recollections of Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne). The year is 1956; Colin has just left Oxford University and is determined to shape himself a career in the film industry. He gets a job as an assistant on The Prince and the Showgirl, starring Marilyn Monroe (Michelle Williams) and Sir Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh). Clark is a bit underpowered as a character, but his main role is to be the lens through which we view the tensions on set.
Available until July 31

The Sisters Brothers (2018)

Set during the California Gold Rush of 1848-55, The Sisters Brothers follows two fraternal assassins as they pursue an ingenious chemist who has invented a lucrative formula for finding rich auriferous deposits in riverbeds. It’s a film that is suffused with sadness, even as it erupts into blood-spattering mayhem. It’s like a Sam Peckinpah western with a heart. Joaquin Phoenix is Charlie Sisters, the volatile killer to John C Reilly’s soft and sympathetic Eli Sisters.
Available until August 1

Moulin Rouge (2001)

All sparkly seduction, lush velvet drapes and enchantment, Baz Luhrmann’s vividly evoked Moulin Rouge is a place where dreams become flesh and blood and everyone subsists on desire and absinthe. It is a dazzling experience. Ewan McGregor is rakish and charming as Christian, a young writer seeking his fortune in Montmartre’s seamy underbelly. Nicole Kidman as Satine, the consumptive courtesan who breaks his heart.
Available until August 3

Gravity (2013)

Alfonso Cuarón’s superb science-fiction picture stars Sandra Bullock and George Clooney as astronauts who find themselves stranded after a catastrophic accident during a spacewalk destroys their vessel. Their fight for survival against the odds is so brilliantly realised that you forgive the implausible plot. Cuarón displays his mastery of the medium, favouring staggeringly ambitious long shots and dazzling special effects.
Available until August 8

Ordinary Love (2019)

Lesley Manville and Liam Neeson, who have rarely been better, star as Joan and Tom, a couple coming to terms with her breast cancer. It’s a film about illness, but more than that it’s about marriage: the hardship and fear being laced with wit, warmth and a comforting sense of authenticity. Manville’s performance is full of stoicism, gallows humour, irritability and blind terror, and it’s refreshing to see Neeson not maiming terrorists but pondering which bin to leave out.
Available until August 8

Manhunter (1986)

Based on Thomas Harris’s novel Red Dragon, Manhunter was the first film to introduce the serial killer Dr Hannibal Lecter — here spelt Lecktor, and played by Brian Cox — to cinema audiences. Lecktor’s incarceration is partly owing to the work of the criminal profiler Will Graham (William Petersen). Now Lecktor hopes to use another serial killer, the Tooth Fairy, to exact revenge. Michael Mann’s slick thriller has been overshadowed by The Silence of the Lambs, but it is compelling film-making.
Available until August 11

Legend (2015)

What’s better than Tom Hardy? Two Tom Hardys in Brylcreem and sharp suits knocking seven bells out of one another in an East End gangster film based on the real-life story of the Kray twins. This biopic is an awful mess, but it’s worth a watch for Hardy alone. Oozing bullish menace, he plays Reggie and Ronnie in a miracle of CGI, split-screen, body-double wizardry. Legend proves that organised crime can become disorganised when it’s in the hands of two very different brothers.
Available until August 15

An Education (2015)

With a masterclass in seductive creepiness from Peter Sarsgaard and a gale-force charm onslaught from Carey Mulligan, this spirited Sixties-set coming-of-age film is driven by first-rate performances. Sarsgaard plays David: he’s dashing, suave and the driver of a cool Bristol sports car. Jenny (Mulligan), the 16-year-old swot, is smitten. Yet from the beginning there is something imperceptibly wrong with David, one note that strikes slightly off key.
Available until August 15

Chariots of Fire (1981)

Hugh Hudson’s Oscar-winning tale of two runners competing in the 1924 Olympics has a simple, undiminished power. From the dramatic opening scene of a group of pale young men racing barefoot along the beach, backed by Vangelis’s Anthem, the film is utterly compelling. Taking its title from the hymn Jerusalem, it tells the true story of a race between two outsiders, Eric Liddell (Ian Charleson) and Harold Abrahams (Ben Cross).
Available until August 20

The Hurt Locker (2008)

Kathryn Bigelow’s incendiary Iraq-set action movie deserved every award it scooped. The urgency of the storytelling and the unfussiness of the direction belie the stark poetry of this portrait of men at war. The conflict is shown from the perspective of an elite bomb-disposal team. Led by the reckless Staff Sergeant William James (an outstanding Jeremy Renner), these are soldiers whose perspectives are so bent out of shape by the constant threat of death that they find it hard to function anywhere but on the front line.
Available until August 20

The Impossible (2012)

Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts star in a drama based on a true story co-written by María Belón, who survived the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Maria, Henry and their three children are enjoying a winter break in Thailand when disaster strikes. The tsunami tears through the luxury resort where the family are staying. Maria and one child are swept one way, Henry and the others in the opposite direction. The film’s recreation of the wave’s impact is genuinely horrifying.
Available until August 22

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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