In this complete streaming guide, you can find where to watch every BAFTA winner for Best Film. This includes where to stream every winner from 1946 until present day on popular streaming services in the United Kingdom.
William Wyler’s 1946 drama The Best Years of Our Lives, an emotional epic about servicemen returning home from the Second World War, swept the board at the Oscars and is an American standard, but it holds a special place in British film history too. It was the big winner at the very first British Academy Film Awards, taking home the prize for the awkwardly named “Best Film From Any Source” - or as it’s now known, Best Film at the BAFTA Film Awards.
The most recent entry on the list is the stunning German war drama All Quiet on the Western Front. In between are decades of notable movies, some of them classics, some of them just acclaimed films of their era, all of them worth checking out and ticking off.
As the years have gone on, the BAFTAs have been compared more and more to their very slightly more prestigious American equivalent, but the British awards have their own identity, rarely trying to second-guess who will grab the Oscar statues. All Quiet is part of a run of recent BAFTA Best Film winners, for instance, that don’t match the Oscar for Best Picture: The Power of the Dog, 1917, Roma, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, La La Land, The Revenant and Boyhood all won the top British prize before missing out across the pond, with only Nomadland breaking the sequence by winning both big gongs in 2020.
Looking further into film history, BAFTA has revealed its tastes by sticking with a few favourites. Martin Scorsese had to wait until 2006 to win his first Best Picture with The Departed - that movie didn’t win Best Film at the BAFTAs, but Marty couldn’t be too annoyed with the Brits because he’d won as far back as 1975 with Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, then again in 1990 for Goodfellas, then yet again in 2004 for The Aviator.
By 2006, BAFTA had given Scorsese enough gongs and was happy to stick up for a filigree British film like The Queen instead. Naturally, the ceremony favours the best of British, giving its top prize to breakout 1990s comedy hits such as Four Weddings and a Funeral and The Full Monty, neither of which were serious Best Picture contenders. BAFTA also loves a good, very English period drama based on a novel, rewarding A Room with a View, Atonement, Howard’s End and Sense and Sensibility.
BAFTA may not always get it right when it comes to films posterity thinks are worth remembering - even cineastes don’t talk much now about The Sound Barrier or Lacombe, Lucien. But its early Best Film roll call is a mine of gems, from Bicycle Thieves and La Ronde to Chariots of Fire and Gandhi. This year’s Best Film nominees - Anatomy of a Fall, The Holdovers, Killers of the Flower Moon, Oppenheimer and Poor Things - know that when BAFTA awards its top prize, the world listens - and watches.
Find streaming offers for every BAFTA winner for Best Film below.
