10 great British pop films

British rock and pop cinema has a gloriously rich back catalogue stretching back decades, almost to the dawn of the British pop era. Cliff Richard, The Dave Clark Five, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones all bolstered their early careers with big-screen projects. The Fab Four made a string of comedy films, reinforcing their marketable cartoon image as cheeky Liverpudlian moptop scamps. David Bowie conceived much of his music in cinematic terms, a cracked actor playing multiple roles, forever hooked to the silver screen. Queen, Elton John and Amy Winehouse all lived stadium-sized lives that have been turned into widescreen melodrama.

This month sees the re-issue, in cinemas and now on disc, of Richard Loncraine’s gritty glam-rock movie Slade in Flame (1975), half a century old yet still a timely depiction of a brutal, cold-hearted music business. The pop industry’s hedonistic extremes and explosive egos have long been reliable sources of darkly operatic screen drama, from tales of fictional crash-and-burn stars like Jim MacLaine in Stardust (1974) and Kate Crowley in Breaking Glass (1980) to the fates of real-life musical martyrs Sid Vicious, Ian Curtis and Freddie Mercury.

British pop films have enjoyed a major resurgence in recent years, driven by proliferating streamer channels’ hunger for content and the enduring purchase power of Baby Boomer nostalgia. The classic rock audience remains huge, flocking to blockbuster biopics including Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) and Rocketman (2019), plus archive-driven documentaries like Asif Kapadia’s Amy (2015) and Bernard MacMahon’s Becoming Led Zeppelin (2025). 

Choosing a top 10 from this vast cinematic jukebox is almost impossible, so think of this selection more like a mixtape playlist featuring greatest hits, cult classics and a few deep cuts.

Director: Peter Watkins

One of the earliest films to cast a bleakly cynical eye over the hollow utopian optimism of the swinging 60s pop boom, Privilege is a darkly satirical Orwellian fable starring Manfred Mann singer Paul Jones as a music superstar co-opted by an authoritarian near-future British government to promote corporate brands, social conformity and conservative religious values. 

Fresh from his controversial faux-documentary The War Game (1966), which was banned by the BBC but later won an Oscar, director Peter Watkins partly based the look of Privilege on a documentary about Canadian-American singer-songwriter Paul Anka, Lonely Boy (1962). Although the results left many critics and audiences cold, its reputation as a prophetic socio-political allegory has since grown. 

As a dystopian depiction of a messianic pop idol in psychic meltdown, this unsettling cult curio now feels like a forebear of Tommy (1975), Pink Floyd: The Wall (1982) and Velvet Goldmine (1998). Watkins also claimed at least one scene was “directly copied” by Stanley Kubrick in A Clockwork Orange (1971).

Director: Claude Whatham / Michael Apted

By the 1970s, the first wave of pop superstars had outgrown their youthful idealism and embraced a more cossetted but compromised tax-exile lifestyle. Rock cinema, after years of adolescent escapism, suddenly became more adult and reflective, looking back with bittersweet nostalgia on the lost innocence of the 1950s and 60s. 

A decade-spanning double-bill drama backed by the same company that would later produce Slade in Flame, Goodtimes Enterprises, Claude Whatham’s That’ll Be the Day and its Michael Apted-directed sequel Stardust starred real-life singer David Essex as Jim MacLaine, a charismatic but refreshingly unlikeable small-town drop-out who slowly climbs to superstar fame with a moptop pop combo, then withdraws into a solo career scuppered by drugs, bloated ego and self-indulgent excess. 

Both films were penned by Beatles biographer Ray Connolly, who partly based MacLaine on John Lennon. An ensemble cast packed with real rock musicians, including Ringo Starr and Keith Moon, reinforces the sense of art imitating life.

Director: Alan Yentob

It began as a humble BBC Arena documentary, but Alan Yentob’s intimate on-the-road profile of David Bowie became a career milestone for star and director alike, catching the flame-haired pop chameleon in mid-flux from cult glam-rock icon to arena-filling superstar. As his 1974 Diamond Dogs tour criss-crosses America, Bowie appears gaunt and paranoid and wired on cocaine, yet remains a highly articulate and funny interviewee. 

By happy coincidence, the film captures the birth of Bowie’s plastic soul period, which would earn him chart-topping US fame. Bowie’s magnetically alien screen presence also persuaded director Nicolas Roeg to cast him as extra-terrestrial visitor Thomas Jerome Newton in his mind-bending sci-fi thriller The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976). Roeg would even borrow visual motifs from Cracked Actor, incorporating Bowie’s Cadillac limousine and real-life minder Anthony Mascia into several scenes. A stranger in a strange land, drowning in temptation and alienation – the parallels were impossible to ignore.

Directors: Eric Idle and Gary Weis

The shockwaves of The Beatles divorcing were still in the air when Monty Python’s Eric Idle conceived this inspired satirical mock-documentary charting the rise and fall of the Rutles, a fictional British band closely modelled on the Fab Four. 

Developed from a short sketch featured on Idle’s BBC series Rutland Weekend Television, and backed by the team behind long-running US comedy juggernaut Saturday Night Live, this full-length TV feature is an irreverent but affectionate homage to the Beatles, packed with starry cameos and superbly crafted pastiche songs courtesy of Neil Innes.

Cameo appearances by Mick Jagger, Michael Palin, Ronnie Wood, Paul Simon, Bill Murray and more add extra comic heft, but major credit is due to George Harrison, who gave the project his blessing and plays a small role. All You Need Is Cash spawned a fantastic soundtrack album of Innes originals and set the blueprint for future music mockumentaries including This Is Spinal Tap (1984) and CB4 (1993).

Director: Julien Temple

After staking his claim as unofficial court filmmaker to the punk movement, Julien Temple made his feature debut with this bold, boisterous, shamelessly inaccurate quasi-documentary about the explosive rise and messy demise of the Sex Pistols. Blending fact and fiction, vulgar comedy, animated sequences and spoof crime thriller elements, this rowdy cinematic collage is not so much a piece of reportage as a stand-alone punk artwork. 

Between thrilling clips of the Pistols in their incendiary prime, Temple’s film is a vehicle for manager Malcolm McLaren’s self-serving account of himself as a Machiavellian pop mastermind, a widely debunked but highly amusing exercise in rock mythology. Temple would later revisit the Pistols story with more sober professionalism in The Filth and the Fury (2000), which he made alongside his acclaimed documentaries on Joe Strummer, Ray Davies, Glastonbury, Wilko Johnson, Shane MacGowan and more.

Director: Franco Rosso

Rooted in post-Windrush Britain’s vibrant reggae and dub soundsystem subculture, Babylon is a gritty, groundbreaking, social-realist docu-drama about inner-city life at the sharp end of racism and police brutality. Headed by Brinsley Forde of Aswad fame, the cast features numerous reggae musicians including Mikey Dread, Drummie Zeb and Jah Shaka. 

Director Franco Rosso was a white British-Italian, but growing up an immigrant in multicultural London helped shape a strongly empathetic bond with his Afro-Caribbean neighbours, inspiring his earlier documentaries on dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson and the Mangrove Nine, with Rosso’s film on the latter a collaboration with pioneering Black British writer-director Sir Horace Ové.

Boasting superb cinematography by future Oscar-winner Chris Menges, and a much-sampled killer soundtrack, Babylon was another prestige credit for Slade in Flame producer Gavrik Losey. Shot on location in the South London boroughs of Brixton and Deptford during a time of widespread street riots, the film proved politically controversial, earning an X certificate in the UK and denied a US release for decades.

Director: Todd Haynes

David Bowie’s imperial Ziggy Stardust phase was the prime inspiration for this wildly ambitious glam-rock pageant by American auteur Todd Haynes, a dazzling counterfactual remix of gender-fluid Britain in the 1970s. Jonathan Rhys Meyers stars as Brian Slade, a priapic peacock rocker modelled on Bowie, while Ewan McGregor lets it all hang out as Curt Wild, an American punk pioneer with heavy Iggy Pop overtones. 

Drawing connections between camp icons like Oscar Wilde and contemporary pop stars, Haynes celebrates the seductive power of calculated artifice and what Freud called polymorphous perversity. A soundtrack featuring members of Radiohead, Suede and Roxy Music (performing together as Venus in Furs), Pulp and others also finds fertile crosstown traffic between the original glam era and the 1990s Britpop boom. Velvet Goldmine was a troubled production and a commercial flop, but it stands up today as a sumptuous bohemian rhapsody of queer liberation and self-made stardom.

Director: Michael Winterbottom

A kaleidoscopic collage of real rock history, fanciful folklore and audacious fabrication, director Michael Winterbottom’s postmodern comic romp recreates the chaotic heyday of Manchester’s iconic post-punk label Factory Records. Critically acclaimed but financially disastrous, Factory was infamous not just for launching notoriously hedonistic bands like New Order and Happy Mondays, but also for founding the legendary Hacienda nightclub, which Winterbottom’s team recreated as a fully working club inside a cavernous Ancoats warehouse. 

Winterbottom and screenwriter Frank Cottrell-Boyce made an inspired choice in filling their colourful ensemble cast with comedians, led by native Mancunian Steve Coogan as Factory’s flamboyant co-founder Tony Wilson. The real Wilson also has a cameo role in 24 Hour Party People, alongside numerous real musicians from the era, lending the film an extra layer of playfully self-aware irony. Coogan and Winterbottom have since become regular collaborators, most notably on their long-running culinary comedy series The Trip.

Director: Anton Corbijn

In a rare case of history repeating itself, first as farce, then tragedy, acclaimed Dutch rock photographer Anton Corbijn followed the myth-making comic anarchy of 24 Hour Party People with his own far more sombre take on the Factory era with this biopic of doomed Joy Division singer Ian Curtis. Control is a starkly beautiful memorial to a lost soul, framed in the timeless monochrome that is a key stylistic signature of Corbijn’s photography work. 

Sam Riley gives a career-launching performance as Macclesfield native Curtis, a tortured small-town poet driven to suicidal despair by his epilepsy and troubled love life. Samantha Morton co-stars as Ian’s wife Debbie, with Alexandra Maria Lara as his Belgian lover Annik Honoré. 

A music-rich soundtrack not just Joy Division but also Bowie, Kraftwerk and Velvet Underground, while the gritty screenplay by Manchester native Matt Greenhalgh is leavened by dry Northern humour. Greenhalgh would later memorialise John Lennon with Nowhere Boy (2009) and Amy Winehouse with Back to Black (2024).

Director: Asif Kapadia

Director Asif Kapadia’s documentary portrait of Amy Winehouse reminds us that the self-destructive singer was supremely talented and effortlessly charismatic, but dangerously ill-equipped for the superstar fame that came with her multi-platinum 2006 album Back to Black. 

Kapadia sticks closely to the approach he used on Senna (2010), interweaving archive footage with contemporary audio interviews. But his most impressive resource is a treasure trove of previously unseen home video material shot during the singer’s childhood and early career, much of it revealing and disarmingly funny. Sweet clips of Winehouse showing off at teenage parties before she was famous only prove that the camera loved her long before the public did. 

Initially endorsed by the singer’s family, who later distanced themselves from the project, Amy is a tender but unflinching memorial to a huge talent, and won Kapadia the Academy Award for best documentary.