Looking at our selection of the 100 greatest British films of the past century, you’ll find that Britain excels at genres you’d expect (kitchen sink, period drama, class-obsessed satire) as well as plenty you wouldn’t (strange sci-fi, blood-freezing contemporary horror).

Whether you’ve fully self-isolated from coronavirus or just want a pleasant date night, here are the essential home-grown films to watch, listed in the order they were made.

1. The Private Life of Henry VIII (Alexander Korda, 1933)

The film that made Korda the leading producer-director of his era and Charles Laughton into an Oscar-winning international star, this is how period biopics should be done: with comic vim, unbridled theatricality and a cavalier jauntiness, thumbing its nose at history. Catherine of Aragon is omitted entirely for being too dull; step forward Merle Oberon as Anne Boleyn and Elsa Lanchester as a hysterically gawky Anne of Cleves. It still has satirical entertainment value that’s not far off Blackadder-esque.

2. The 39 Steps (Alfred Hitchcock, 1935)

There have been four major film versions of Scottish author John Buchan’s 1915 thriller The Thirty-Nine Steps but the best of the quartet is Alfred Hitchcock’s marvellously inventive 1935 film. The story – about an innocent man accused of murder being pursued by both the police and a deadly spy ring – appealed to Hitchcock’s love of paranoia and the man on the run.

3. Sabotage (Alfred Hitchcock, 1936)

Hitchcock took a great Edwardian novel, about an inept terrorist and his credulous wife, and boiled it down to 76 breakneck minutes. The result is a zinging enigma of a movie, punctuated with disquieting images and haunting snatches of speech.

4. The Lady Vanishes (Alfred Hitchcock, 1938)

The film that catapulted Hitchcock to Hollywood was the second-to-last, and perhaps also the very best, that he made in Britain. In this lightning-witted comic thriller, Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave’s travellers-in-arms comb their train for a disappeared fellow passenger everyone else insists they never saw – a riveting core mystery from which Hitchcock allows all kinds of secrets and deceptions to spider-web out.