Jack Seale

It was a hit TV series in the 1960s and 1980s, but now when you hear the name Mission: Impossible - or that propulsive Lalo Schifrin theme tune - you can only think of Tom Cruise as Impossible Missions Force agent Ethan Hunt. The franchise has slowly taken over Cruise’s film career, becoming a byword for the actor’s own incredible stunt work. Find out where to watch every Mission: Impossible movie in chronological order with our streaming guide, below.

It starts with Mission: Impossible, which announces that it is not just a cash-in revival of an old favourite in the opening minutes by re-introducing and then immediately killing off the character of Jim Phelps, a remnant of the TV show. Ethan Hunt is then established as a super-capable field agent, with Ving Rhames appearing as faithful computer hacker sidekick Luther Stickell.

Mission: Impossible II sees Hunt team up with a professional thief played by Thandiwe Newton, the pair of them travelling to Australia to stop a rogue agent releasing a deadly genetically modified virus. In Mission: Impossible III, the great Philip Seymour Hoffman is an arms dealer who almost gets the better of Hunt, in a film that introduces cast regular Michelle Monaghan as Ethan’s fiancée Julia.

By this point, Tom Cruise has already dangled off a cliff, run from thousands of gallons of coursing water, and had the point of a knife held millimetres from his open eye, all of these stunts filmed without doubles and with minimal special effects. In Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, the stakes are raised further as he climbs the outside of the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa, in a film that also introduces core cast member Simon Pegg as Benji Dunn.

Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation marks the moment when M:I becomes a more coherent franchise - this and all the subsequent films are directed by Chris McQuarrie, working closely with the real boss of the series, Tom Cruise. Before that, the films were helmed by directors who were well established in their own right: Brian de Palma, John Woo, JJ Abrams and Brad Bird.

The stunts only get more epic. In Rogue Nation there’s a fantastic motorbike chase, an unbelievable opening scene featuring Cruise hanging off the side of a plane as it takes off, and a genuinely perilous sequence where the actor is filmed underwater for an extended period and is clearly holding his breath for real.

Mission: Impossible - Fallout has a tough act to follow, but it trumps Rogue Nation with a one-take skydive, a fabulous helicopter chase and a notorious rooftop leap, during which you can clearly see the moment where Cruise breaks his ankle. Not wishing to waste a set-up that took weeks to plan, Cruise got up and ran out of shot, thus completing a usable take, before seeking medical treatment.

That brings us to Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One, where the big stunt is perhaps the greatest of Cruise’s career, in terms of the amount of planning required and the level of risk involved: he rides a motorbike straight off a cliff. That movie’s upcoming sequel has a lot to live up to - and if you’ve not seen all the Mission: Impossible movies, you’ve got a lot of heart-pounding action to get through.

Find out where to stream it all with our list.

Are you a Benedict Cumberbatch stan or a Jeremy Brett purist? Is everyone wasting their time trying to beat Basil Rathbone, or did Robert Downey Jr reinvent the role? Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s immortal creation Sherlock Holmes has appeared in countless dramatisations - find out where to stream the best ones with our ranked streaming guide, below.

First, a shout out to the offshoots, oddballs, reimaginings and Holmeses in disguise. Sherlock is a dog in Sherlock Hound and a mouse, or at least the obvious inspiration for a mouse sleuth, in The Great Mouse Detective. In Without a Clue he’s a character created by Dr Watson. In Miss Sherlock he is a she, with a female Watson to boot. For a while in the 2000s, the biggest TV show in the world was the one starring Hugh Laurie as a man with an intimidating demeanour, a drug addiction and a genius for deduction… he was a doctor, not a detective, but if you hadn’t twigged, the title of the series - House - was a cute clue.

Of the versions that feature a human man called Sherlock, plenty of the lesser-known ones deserve to be streamed. Horror stalwart Peter Cushing was a fine Holmes on the big screen - and in The Hound of the Baskervilles he stars in the Holmes story with the scariest horror vibes. Nicholas Rowe is a sharp, quirky young Holmes in Young Sherlock Holmes; Ian McKellen is a vulnerable old Holmes in Mr Holmes. Robert Stephens is the best random, one-off Holmes ever, as the lead in Billy Wilder’s funny, imaginative The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Then there’s Henry Cavill in Enola Holmes.

Having been established as a lead character in film by Basil Rathbone in The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1939, Holmes was revived as a movie franchise in 2009 by Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes, with Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law making for likably energetic versions of Holmes and Watson. But in recent years, any screen Holmes has to measure up to Benedict Cumberbatch in the BBC TV series Sherlock. It made Cumberbatch an A-list star and brought Holmes back for a new generation: the later seasons arguably lose their way as they try to second-guess the show’s hyper-engaged fanbase, but at its best it’s a fearsomely slick, confident production.

Sherlock’s success left space for more TV takes on Holmes, with the American response coming in the form of Elementary. Led by Jonny Lee Miller as a troubled Sherlock in New York, its case-of-the-week format makes it a good bet for Holmes traditionalists, but Lucy Liu’s new spin on Watson keeps it fresh.

The wonder of Holmes derives from the original stories, however, and so our pick for the best Holmes ever is the one that most feels like the Conan Doyle character brought to life. That’s Jeremy Brett in Sherlock Holmes, the ITV series that ran for a decade from 1984. It’s the definitive version, with Brett the ideal of the great detective: mysterious, mercurial, playful and sharp. Scroll down to find out where to watch it, and the rest of our ranked list.

Alex Garland has come a long way since The Beach made him a celebrated novelist at the end of the 1990s. Back then, his tale of drugs and excess on the Asian backpacking trail ensured he was cult literature’s next big thing, but Garland had bigger, grander plans for himself. As shown by Civil War, the latest movie dystopia written and directed by Garland, the British auteur has become one of sci-fi and fantasy cinema’s most important visionaries. Find out where to stream all his work in chronological order with our streaming guide, below.

The Beach became a film in 2000, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and directed by Danny Boyle. The screenplay wasn’t written by Garland, but he still struck up a relationship with Boyle, writing two of the British director’s subsequent films. The zombie/virus apocalypse horror 28 Days Later, with an original screenplay by Garland, was a huge hit; the thoughtful space drama Sunshine, which reunited Boyle and Garland with lead actor Cillian Murphy, was less successful but was still an imaginative, serious piece of work.

After providing uncredited rewrites for 28 Days Later sequel 28 Weeks Later, and dramatising the Kazuo Ishiguro novel Never Let Me Go for director Mark Romanek, Garland wrote Dredd, a comic-book adaptation now seen as a cult classic - according to star Karl Urban, Garland was so instrumental in completing the film after director Pete Travis left the project prematurely that he ought to be seen as its real director.

Then Garland did start officially directing his own scripts, and his career immediately stepped up a level. He started with Ex Machina, a tautly confined but visually stunning fable about an artificially intelligent robot that is dangerously close to human-like sentience. Next came what is perhaps Garland’s greatest achievement to date, the unforgettable Annihilation. Starring Natalie Portman as the leader of a group of female scientists sent to investigate an alien crash zone known for inexplicable happenings, it’s a very rare example of a high-concept horror that gets scarier and scarier as it goes on, without losing its philosophical thread.

Following that breakthrough, Garland took stock and pivoted briefly into television, helming a deep-thinking sci-fi series: Devs tells the story of an advanced quantum computing company whose bosses are willing to kill to protect their secrets.

Garland returned to cinema with a modern take on folk horror. Men sees Jessie Buckley play a traumatised widow whose holiday to a remote English village becomes a nightmare filled with visceral peril, but the twist - Rory Kinnear apparently playing multiple roles - places the film squarely in the Garland canon of movies with a big central idea, cannily executed.

That brings us to Civil War, which looks set to push Garland back towards the top of the box-office charts. Kirsten Dunst and regular Garland cast member Nick Offerman star in a sweeping tale about a near-future America descending into violence - Garland can be relied on to make that story as thrilling as it is thought-provoking.

Watch all of Alex Garland’s work in order using our streaming guide below.

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.

One of the UK’s best ever gangster series, Top Boy has had a history on broadcast channels and streaming TV that is almost as unpredictable as the lives of its characters: a cancellation, a celebrity endorsement, a new home, a change of name and, in 2023, the release of a fifth and final season all form part of the show’s story. Find out where to watch all of Top Boy in the right order in our streaming guide below.

Top Boy made an explosive debut on Channel 4 in 2011, taking us into the (fictional) Summerhouse estate in Hackney, east London and introducing us to the two characters who would drive the action right up until the devastating final episode, 12 years later. Dushane (Ashley Walters) and Sully (Kane Robinson) are drug dealers whose friendship is constantly put at risk by the dangerous world they live in and their own competing ambitions.

As well as Sully and Dushane, season one also follows the story of Ra’Nell (Malcolm Kamulete), a schoolboy whose difficult domestic circumstances cause him to be dragged slowly into a world of threats and violence, and Kamale (Tayo Jarrett), a ruthless rival drug dealer who tries to muscle in on the Summerhouse turf. Season two deals with the aftermath of the clash with Kamale, and with the first cracks in Sully and Dushane’s alliance.

Those original two seasons have now been bought by Netflix and rebranded as Top Boy: Summerhouse - if you see that on your Netflix screen, don’t worry, it’s the same show, and that’s what you should watch first. Netflix made the change in order to differentiate the Channel 4 seasons from the subsequent three, which began showing on Netflix in 2019, six years after Top Boy had been cancelled by Channel 4.

The revival came about thanks to the drama’s strong links with the world of music: Walters, Robinson (aka Kano) and Jarrett (aka Scorcher) were all better known as rappers before turning to acting, and it was Canadian MC Drake who was instrumental in ensuring Top Boy continued. With Drake, a huge Top Boy fan, on board as executive producer, the show returned as a Netflix exclusive and ran for three further seasons.

Those episodes - they’re the ones Netflix refers to simply as Top Boy - widen the scope of the show, with scenes set inside prison and in Jamaica, Spain and Morocco. But the rivalry between Sully and Dushane persists, as does the programme’s sharp depiction of how easy it is for those living in deprived areas of London to be sucked into violent crime. That smart, humane view of the context in which drug wars occur - the changing face of London in the 2010s and 2020s, as inequality increases and life for Summerhouse residents becomes even harder, is examined with increased focus in the Netflix revival - is what makes Top Boy a modern classic.

See below for where to stream the box set from the start.