10 great modern British black-and-white films

A black-and-white boxing drama made during the colour era that doesn’t pull its punches, and that shows the hardships of the fighter lifestyle. Not Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980) but Shane Meadows’ TwentyFourSeven (1997). This month sees the film being remastered on Blu-ray complete with newly recorded commentaries and archive clips of 100-year-old boxing bouts.

Set on a Nottingham housing estate, TwentyFourSeven’s monochrome cinematography perfectly captures the adrenaline of the sport at its centre (world heavyweight champion George Foreman once described boxing as “the sport to which all other sports aspire”). In a magnificent late-career performance, Bob Hoskins plays idealistic coach Alan Darcy, who’s determined to unite the gangs of jobless teens from his hometown into a single boxing club that can compete nationally. One by one he convinces each of his frustrated fighters that he needs them and that fights are won on willpower, maintaining: “If you lose your temper, you lose.”

While other 1990s Brit flicks cashed in on the colourful ‘Cool Britannia’ movement, TwentyFourSeven offered a stark look at a town robbed of its industry and a generation robbed of their hope. Meadows would dig out his black-and-white cameras again for Somers Town (2008), which is set during a heatwave and whose sizzling grey skies recall the Sahara in Ice Cold in Alex (1958). Like other modern British movies that eschew colour it feels oddly undated.

Director: Tony Scott

He was known as one of the kings of the hi-octane blockbuster thanks to hits like Top Gun (1986) and True Romance (1993). But over a decade earlier Tony Scott shot this 50-minute black-and-white drama made long after colour reels became the norm. 

As in the early films of fellow Brit director Alan Clarke we’re in a confined setting – a remote farmhouse – whose elderly occupant, played by Rosamund Greenwood, laments her biggest hopes and regrets. With no other confidant in her life (her brother Ambrose, as played by Roy Evans, works at the local mine, a vocation that has left him unable or unwilling to speak), our heroine recounts how she once hit a young man (David Pugh) with her car, and provided the victim with palliative care instead of reporting the accident to the authorities. It’s an intimate confessional, and Scott shoots the collision scene with enough fast cuts and bloodshed to hint at the mayhem he’d later serve up in Hollywood.

Director: David Lynch

David Lynch’s debut feature Eraserhead (1977) imagined a black-and-white hellscape where demonesses call to us from inside radiators, and our hero has to endure his skull breaking apart. For the director’s second picture he sticks to the same colour scheme but targets the heart instead of our cerebral cortex. John Hurt is barely recognisable as Joseph ‘John’ Merrick, who is rescued from the clutches of a carnival ringmaster by the kindly Dr Frederick Treves (Anthony Hopkins), set on proving that Merrick’s physical disability hasn’t hampered his intellect or his spirit. 

The character becomes a cause célèbre for the upper classes, but quickly learns that his benefactors are using his condition to convince themselves of their charity. Freddie Francis’s photography shows the double standards of Victorian London: the great unwashed are never far from centre screen in his exterior shots, the most famous of which culminates with Merrick forced to scream for his privacy after he’s pursued by a mob. 

Director: Sally Potter

In the same year as Luc Besson imagined a grey dystopia in his sci-fi debut The Last Battle (1983), Sally Potter offered an alternative black-and-white future: one assembled by an all-female crew and in which women try to escape the evils of materialism and exploitative men. Colette Laffont and Julie Christie play would-be revolutionaries who are alternately menaced and then employed by predators, moving through a series of hallucinatory vignettes: icy wastelands, musical daydreams, high-society dances from which they flee on horseback. 

Does the best future our heroines can imagine involve them being seen as something more than a resource? Potter would return to monochrome decades later for The Party (2017), an arguably even more mould-breaking picture that imagined a political gathering where the guests almost keep a lid on their indiscretions.

Director: Isaac Julien

By the close of the 80s, black and white was becoming international shorthand for grittiness: the USSR had unleashed Konstantin Lopushansky’s Dead Man’s Letters (1986), which imagined a sepia landscape so shattered by nuclear war that it could be classed as a companion piece to Mick Jackson’s Threads (1984). Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston, however, closed the decade on a more optimistic note, working as both a memoriam to the Harlem Renaissance movement of the 1920s as well as a salute to the Black British gay experience. 

Pre-colour films about marginalised sexuality in the UK were distinctly downbeat: Basil Dearden’s Victim (1961), about a blackmailed Dirk Bogarde, felt cautionary, while Duffer (1971) portrayed a hostile gay relationship. Julien’s film is celebratory and vivid despite its limited colour scheme – it may be the most important gay movie of the year, overshadowed only by Heiner Carow’s Coming Out (1989), which had the misfortune of featuring East German cinema’s first LGBTQIA+ lead character but sadly opened on the night the Berlin Wall fell.

Director: Christopher Newby

Drawing inspiration from The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) – praised for one of the most gripping portrayals of female martyrdom put to film – Christopher Newby’s cult drama sees both Christopher Ecclestone and the late Pete Postlethwaite very nearly out-acted by Natalie Morse as Christine Carpenter: a real-life religious recluse who was persecuted by locals in her 14th-century Surrey village, and who agreed to be walled in to her local church to meditate on matters theological (and to escape a passionless marriage). 

Punk fans might recognise a black-and-white Toyah Willcox as Christine’s no-nonsense mum, someone the local priest suspects of being a witch. Although Christine appears less combative, and even swears “perpetual chastity” before being confined to her four stone walls, she’s inspired by nature to follow her instincts and break out of her physical and social cocoons. 

Director: Christopher Nolan

Christopher Nolan throws three of his favourite ingredients in this self-shot debut: disjointed timelines, slippery antiheroes and a kick-in-the-teeth denouement. There’s even a hint at his later career in the shape of a Batman symbol glimpsed on an apartment door. We’re dropped into the shadowy world of Bill, a would-be writer who kills time by following strangers across London in the hope of gathering story material. One day one of his targets introduces themselves: Cobb, a housebreaker with a cut-glass accent who steals as a means of showing people what they’ve no longer got. As the pair slip in and out of flats, Bill becomes taken with one of his victims and finds himself drawn deeper into the criminal underworld. 

Filmed at weekends while his cast and crew worked regular jobs, Nolan’s noir shows what can be done with a taut script, some 16mm stock and the ability to rearrange a thriller plot like an anagram.

Director: May Miles Thomas

Scotland’s first digital film, care of director May Miles Thomas, is as much a screenwriting marvel as it is a technical one. Maureen Carr plays Trise, a resilient but unfocused single mum who’s too caught up between her abusive ex and her telephone tarot card job to notice that her son John Kielty is becoming a male sex worker. Despite the lack of sunshine in either of their lives, Thomas makes her characters’ worlds glow, and portrays them not as villains or victims but people determined to do their best no matter how bleak their circumstances. 

The film won four Scottish BAFTAs and today ranks as an overlooked gem in the kitchen sink vein: its colourless but bright look at estate life echoes The Moon over the Alley (1976), Joseph Despins’ black-and-white musical that imagined the hardships inside Notting Hill boarding houses.

Director: Ben Wheatley

After the spilled guts and garish anoraks of his murderous camping comedy Sightseers (2012), Ben Wheatley rolled back the colours and the calendar for this tale about English Civil War deserters (Reece Shearsmith and Michael Smiley) who fall under the spell of an alchemist. Forcing them to accompany him in his search for buried treasure, our fighters are soon consuming mushrooms and hallucinating their way around a meadow. 

Are they being used as human divining rods or just tripping? Can they really raise rival alchemists out of the ground the same way you might pull weeds? Is the treasure the men are hunting for precious metal or something even more terrifying than the battle they’ve just escaped? The black-and-white freakouts come thick and fast: think Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse (2019) but storm-lashed rocks swapped for an area of outstanding natural beauty. 

Director: Brian Welsh

There’s a different kind of civil disobedience in this period-piece set during the early 90s, and director Brian Welsh wants us to know that the losing side didn’t go down without a fight. Executive-produced by Steven Soderbergh, Beats teems with illicit energy as best mates Johnno (Cristian Ortega) and Spanner (Lorn Macdonald) attempt to get to the last rave of their lives. 

It’s the eve of the government’s controversial Public Order Act 1994, the ruling which targeted the free party scene by banning outdoor gatherings whose music is “characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats”. In real life, electronic music act Autechre staged a revolt by releasing the unrepetitive Anti EP; on screen, our two heroes show their defiance by partying hard but in good spirits – think Bill and Ted in tracksuits. The climactic warehouse scene features 1,000 bouncing extras and the colours rushing in for one perfect moment: a pot of gold at the end of a black-and-white rainbow.

Director: Mark Jenkin

Director Mark Jenkin rightly won a BAFTA for this salty tale set in picturesque Cornwall, and which, despite its lack of colour, is as visually striking as anything James Cameron could throw at you. Shot on Kodak film stock using a hand-cranked 16mm camera we follow gruff fisherman Martin (Edward Rowe) as he struggles to stay afloat while his job market sinks post-Brexit vote.

The family home has been sold to Londoners Tim (Simon Shepherd) and Sandra (Mary Woodvine); his brother (Giles King) is forced to use his own boat to take stag parties on tours around the cove – and to grit his teeth as they take hilarious selfies with sex toys. The shimmering visuals and rumbling sound production mimic the feeling of being underwater: it’s almost as if we’re snorkelling instead of watching a film.