It’s been a tough few years for all the film fanatics amongst you. With cinemas being shut for so long, many huge film releases kept being pushed back, and it felt like they would never see the light of day. Thankfully though, everything has slowly returned to near normal, and cinema starved folk are now rushing out to catch the latest blockbuster releases. The best example of this is No Time to Die, which is the latest entry in the James Bond franchise, and now seems set to break Box Office records.

Like all great Bond flicks, parts of the movie are set in our beautiful city of London, and it got us thinking, which other exhilarating films are based in the capital? With the city being one of the most bustling and exciting places on the planet, it’s no wonder that there are some great cinematic masterpieces that have London as their backdrop.

Layer Cake

This was the film that won Daniel Craig his James Bond role, and watching it back, you can see why those in charge of casting him were blown away by his turn as a slick professional criminal. In fact, many fans think the film is Craig’s best ever performance on screen. It was released in 2004 and focuses on Craig’s nameless character, who wants to say goodbye to his life of crime and retire peacefully. Unfortunately for him, it turns out that the world of crime doesn’t want to let him go so easily.

Layer Cake makes great use of having its narrative take place mainly in London, and it is stacked with mesmerising locations that breathe life into the film. From the cobbled residential streets around Kensington, to the green lawns of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich Park, there’s all the delights of the metropolis on show.

Snatch

Guy Ritchie is a huge Hollywood director nowadays, with him even getting given the keys to Disney’s Aladdin live-action remake in 2019. However, before he was directing dancing genies and magic-carpet rides for the biggest brand in the world, Ritchie was known for his gritty, yet comedic, Cockney gangster films. 2000’s Snatch is, we think, the director’s perfect balance of crime and caper.

The film is, basically, a mesmerising love letter to the shadier aspects of London’s urban world, and whilst they’re not exactly places you’d ever wish to spend much time in the real world, Ritchie’s film-making skills make it a fun experience to watch them through a screen for an hour and forty-four minutes. It helps that the characters that make up Snatch’s world are larger than life, and have a wise-cracking line ready to quip at any and every unsavoury moment.

Amongst the stellar British talent, such as Jason Statham and Stephen Graham, there are some major Hollywood stars involved as well. Brad Pitt is memorable as a hard to understand Irish traveller, and Benicio Del Toro turns in a blistering performance as Frankie ‘Four Fingers’, who is a prolific gambler who always finds himself drawn to the high rollers.

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28 Days Later

If you ever wanted to witness the normally hectic London streets being barren and deserted, then 28 Days Later is the film for you. It was released in 2002 to universal critical acclaim, and the story is about a highly contagious virus that causes the complete breakdown of society. Whilst that might sound a bit close to home now, back then it was revolutionary and had everyone jumping out of their seats.

It was fundamentally a zombie movie in everything but name, as the virus turned its victims into rage-driven animals who stopped at nothing to pass it on. Unlike every zombie movie that had come before though, instead of the infected being slow and ponderous, they could run and move swiftly, which suddenly made them even more terrifying.

It features Cillian Murphy as the unlucky man who wakes up from a coma in this nightmare world, completely unaware of how society has collapsed around him in just twenty-eight days. As he wonders the desolate streets of London, you get to witness the picturesque but jarring sights of Westminster Bridge, Piccadilly Circus, and Oxford Street all completely empty.