This weekend I also saw In This World, famously praised by the critic for the Daily Telegraph as "the best British film of my lifetime." I wouldn't go nearly that far, but it's still worth seeing. This begs the question, of course, of what is the best British film of my lifetime? And the embarrassing thing is, I can't think of a single one that I'd go to bat for. Very strange. This isn't to say that I'm indifferent to British cinema: as I've said before, my favorite directors these days are probably Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, with Hitchcock somewhere close behind, and I still think that the arguably British The Third Man is the most perfect film ever made. But I'm hard-pressed to think of a single British film from the past twenty years that has really made it into my personal canon. (I can't bring myself to name something like The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, although that comes about as close as anything else.) I'll have to think about this a bit more, obviously.