Blimey, guvna! They's some cracking pictures, they is!

Imagine me saying the line above in my worst attempt at Dick Van Dyke doing his worst attempt at cockney in Mary Poppins, and you'll get what I was going for.

Coming off my recent Powellpalooza, Time Out London has compiled a list of the hundred best British films of all time. (As usual, many thanks to CHUD for bring it to my attention.) This ambitious endeavor was accomplished by polling one hundred fifty people—filmmakers, actors, critics, and others, of many nationalities—on their favorite British films and compiling the list from their choices.

(However, as a side note, what qualifies as a "British film" remains somewhat unclear. The Third Man (number 2) was directed by a Briton and was partially filmed in England, but was mostly filmed on location in Vienna, and its two lead actors were American. The Offence (number 79) had British actors and was filmed in England, but its director, Sidney Lumet, and studio, United Artists, were both American. Stanley Kubrick (Barry Lyndon (number 19), A Clockwork Orange (number 34), and 2001 (number 57)) and Terry Gilliam (Brazil (number 24) and Monty Python and the Holy Grail (number 54)) both were born in the United States and moved to Britain in adulthood. (But we Yanks know that you can take the American out of America, but you can't take America out of the American, so they should still count as ours, damn it!) Repulsion (number 45) was directed by a Pole, Roman Polanski, and Blow-Up (number 47) by an Italian, Michelangelo Antonioni, though both were filmed and take place in London. Brazil was filmed in England, but was produced and distributed by American companies. Walkabout (number 61) was filmed entirely in Australia, and The Bridge on the River Kwai (number 86) entirely on Sri Lanka (though the former is a Commonwealth dominion, and the latter was at the time, so maybe that's a gray area). I guess the main criterion they used is whether the director's British. I didn't mean to get as sidetracked as I now have on this question, but it's an important one if we're assigning films a particular nationality. Are The Bourne Supremacy and United 93 "British films" because Greengrass is British? Is Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone American and The Prisoner of Azkaban Mexican because of their respective directors' nationalities?)

Still reading? Sorry about the derail. Back to Time Out London's list. Sadly, it's lists like this one, compiled by truly learned and astute filmlovers (as opposed to people whose cinematic memory reaches no further back than Star Wars), that make me realize how far I still have to go as an appreciator and student of film. I've only seen twenty-one of the films on the list (though six more are presently in my Netflix queue, for whatever that's worth), and only three—The Third Man, The Red Shoes (number 5), and Trainspotting (number 10)—among the top ten. I've never even heard of the number-one film (though I just saw another film by the same director). I don't even have the (bad) excuse of not wanting to read subtitles (though I've seen some British films that really could use them). I guess I've still got a lot of cinematic work ahead of me.