Danny Boyle came onto the scene with the smash hit Shallow Grave, immediately taking the BAFTA for Best British film. Since then, he’s won an Oscar, directed the 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony, and declined a knighthood due to his beliefs against the monarchy. From his working-class upbringing and childhood plans to become a priest, Boyle has become one of the most respected directors in the world.
In anticipation of his upcoming FX series Pistol, surrounding the rise and fall of the infamous Sex Pistols, we’ve taken a look at the top ten films over Boyle’s career thus far. Thematically, the Boyle biosphere swaps between looking at how those dealt the best hands destroy themselves to how those given the worst hands bluff their way into victories. From the horrors of 28 Days Later and the charming adventures of Millions, Boyle has shown he isn’t a niche auteur, but a jack of all genres.
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
10 Yesterday
An idea that everyone’s had in some capacity, Yesterday asks what you would do if given the opportunity to steal art from your timeline and “create” it in another; say in this circumstance, The Beatles’ discography. Some of Yesterday’s appeal rests in a deification of the band, that this intellectual property theft isn’t for individual gain but more like Moses claiming he wrote the Commandments; a change in an extraordinary tale in order to make this “gift“ more believable. Ultimately, its merit is in its charm and soundtrack rather than hard-hitting theses and should be recommended to Beatles fans before cinephiles.
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
9 Shallow Grave
Steinbeck picked a pearl, Huston gold nuggets, Shallow Grave the trusty suitcase of money. As a roommate’s overdose reveals a fortune in cash, three friends dispose of the body and evade law enforcement, gangsters, and paranoia against one another in an attempt to keep the treasure safe. As Boyle’s debut, Shallow Grave was gruesome, hilarious, and lucrative: the highest-grossing British film of 1995. While Boyle grew as a director since, its daringness and fun make it well worth the watch 25 years later.
8 T2 Trainspotting
With a mega-hit like Trainspotting, the task of reexamining the characters two decades after the shocking ending left plenty of room for disaster. Luckily for Boyle, T2 Trainspotting’s script was just about exactly what it needed to be: fine. Where the original was a revelation in how privileged appropriations of anti-hierarchy activities equal self-destruction, the sequel was just focused on continuing the aesthetics, sounds, and lore of Trainspotting. It doesn’t have as many brilliant sequences or drilling questions, but for a movie that was almost certainly going to be as ruinous as its protagonists, its safeness is a small victory for fans.
7 Millions
A hidden gem of the Boyle filmography, Millions is about Damian, a Catholic child, discovering a fortune of British pounds and (not realizing it’s the remnants of a heist) giving it all away before it can “expire” in the oncoming conversion to the Euro. The surprising power of Millions isn’t just in being a religious tale about how often the Church will deny the generous rules they expect of others, but in how our entire social system bars any ability for charity to actually result in widespread change. Millions can fill you with a childlike drive to make the world a better place, and then the mature comprehension that poverty isn’t a difficult riddle, but an economic policy.
6 Sunshine
The sun is dying and needs to be super-nuked back into not dying. It’s important to know two things about this movie. 1) The first hour is quite possibly some of the greatest sci-fi you’ll ever see in your life — brilliant, inventive, gut-wrenching, philosophical. It’s a masterpiece beyond reason. 2) The last half hour is so terrible that the movie doesn’t just faceplant normally, but into an infinite abyss, that painful contact never arriving. It’s one of the greatest tragedies in all of sci-fi film history. If you want to enjoy Sunshine to its fullest and you have an absurd amount of self-control, wait for the moment (about an hour in) where the computer declares how many people are on board the ship, then turn it off and fantasize your own ending. For that fumble, it rests just before the Top 5 instead of being in the Top 1.
5 Steve Jobs
Having Boyle direct, Sorkin write, and Fassbender act is, by all means, using a cheat code. Often sidelined as being the less phenomenal, younger sibling of The Social Network, Steve Jobs looks at the original tech messiah through three different product demos over his lifetime. The snarky dialogue is some of Sorkin’s most playful, with everyone being in tech and therefore smart. The performances are across the board excellent, Kate Winslet doing a new Eastern European accent and Seth Rogen doing a new Seth Rogen. And Boyle’s hand is steady, letting you feel each era exactly as it was, Jobs exactly as he was: a genius with too much need to prove he was one and a father with too much need to prove he wasn’t one.
4 28 Days Later
Often cited as being the first post-9/11 reckoning in film, 28 Days Later looks at a comatose man who wakes up a month into a zombie pandemic; what does a major disaster look like, and how may society’s response to it worsen society? Much of the filming was finished prior to the attacks, but that makes it a Cassandra of sorts, expecting not only for devastation to be so tribilizing but for imposing authorities to exploit any opportunity to impose authoritarian exploitation — something that much of the U.S. population somehow did not see coming in real life. It’s a suspenseful run through a man realizing disaster and revitalized the zombie genre even when Boyle has been adamant that it’s not a zombie movie, and deserves your attention.
3 127 Hours
The lonely survival movie is an impressive field: Life of Pi, Gravity, All is Lost, arguably even The Martian. It doesn’t just require an enchanting lead actor to keep us engrossed for the whole movie, but a clever director to evolve a hole into its own world. The magic of 127 Hours is that you’re watching a man, whose arm is trapped by a rock, experience a lifetime of realizations not just about the gravity of his situation here, but about his life as it directly revolves around him and this rock. It’s not calmly philosophical but a desperate and honest plea for rescue towards every possible responder in his existence. Again, where some Boyle movies are about people who are given a fortune and squander it, this one is about someone who’s given a death sentence and makes the best of it.
2 Slumdog Millionaire
It won Best Picture, it gave Boyle his Oscar for Directing, it put Dev Patel on the cinematic map, it’s just a thrill to watch. Two orphans and their friend grow from surviving poverty together to having relationships both long lost and abusive. When one is picked to be on Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, knowing every answer as if miraculously tailored from episodes of his life, he gets his first-ever chance to affect change in his life — and the lives of his fellow Musketeers. Slumdog Millionaire is a delicate balance between realistically looking at the hard truths about capitalism designating poverty and not allowing that realism to cloud its romantic ideals of destiny and love. Some stories need to talk about the rules of society to educate those that don’t need to follow them, but some stories can just be where the underdog finally gets fed.
1 Trainspotting
Via: Park Circus
This sits among a specific pantheon of greats, often Fincher and Scorsese, where the movie mocks a certain group of people’s self-assigned plights, then those people watch that very movie, then those people are daft enough to think the movie champions them unironically. This movie is about privilege, not disobedience, and it’s just majestic. There are too many reasons to love Trainspotting, from the daring and inventive shots to the soundtrack, the performances to that gut-wrenching moment, but maybe its most brilliant contribution to cinema is how unforgivingly it portrays opioid use and its consequences. Where for many heroin is a difficult reality of rugged individualism, for a choice few it’s a bizarre game of chicken to leverage society for more privilege: a spoiled child holding its breath. The ability to distinguish between those two users is where this movie hits its jackpot. It’s not for the squeamish, but a shot right in your veins could never be.
