In 2023, Guy Ritchie celebrated 25 years as a feature film director. His reputation has risen and fallen a couple of times along the way, but he’s still here and, with Netflix’s The Gentlemen, he’s successfully hopped aboard the bandwagon of converting films to streaming TV series. Find out how to watch all Ritchie’s work in chronological order with our streaming guide below.
Ritchie arrived in 1998 with the low-budget gangster comedy-drama Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, which featured several of the motifs that would re-occur throughout the director’s career: a performance by Jason Statham, who was then unknown; another by Vinnie Jones, who was previously known only as a footballer; and an interest in the wisecracking but bumbling low-lifes populating the criminal underworld in London. Ritchie cannily followed up this cult hit by making basically the same movie again, but with bigger stars: Snatch retained Statham and Jones in its cast, adding Brad Pitt as an indecipherable Irishman and Benicio del Toro as a gambler/thief named Frankie Four-Fingers.
Ritchie was by now a star, all the more so for having married Madonna in the year Snatch was released. At this point, his golden touch deserted him, with his first critical mauling coming for Swept Away, an island castaway movie with Madonna in the lead. Ritchie then returned to his roots with the crime capers Revolver and RocknRolla, starring Jason Statham and Gerard Butler respectively.
Neither was as well received as his first two films, but Ritchie was still in the game, and his next move hustled him into a new area of mass-market movie-making: he helmed 2009’s Sherlock Holmes and its 2011 sequel, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, with Robert Downey Jr as Holmes and Jude Law as Watson. Both were chunky box-office hits. Ritchie now had a second string to his bow, as an overseer of reboots and reimaginings.
Neither The Man from U.N.C.L.E. nor King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, his next two movies, made anywhere near as much money as their studios were hoping. But Ritchie bounced back again when he took charge of the live-action remake of Aladdin, released in cinemas in 2011. Starring Will Smith as the genie, Aladdin was a billion-dollar smash.
Soon after, Ritchie also restored his knack for creating naughty thrillers about chaps committing crimes: The Gentlemen recruited Matthew McConaughey, Colin Farrell and Hugh Grant to the Ritchie repertory, telling a tall tale about American drug dealers coming up against old-fashioned British wrong’uns. Ritchie then reunited with Jason Statham for action thriller Wrath of Man and spy comedy Operation Fortune.
The more serious war drama The Covenant was loved more by critics than by audiences, for the first time in Ritchie’s career - the same can’t be said of The Gentlemen, an unpretentious TV spin-off from Ritchie’s own movie that debuted on Netflix in 2023. Good or bad, successful or flop, Guy Ritchie’s films always aim primarily to entertain, and he looks set to do that again in 2024 with The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.
To watch all his work in the order it was released, check out our streaming guide below.
