Cinema & Television — What a Gentleman Should Watch

The Sunday Night Film

The Talented Mr. Ripley

Film · 1999 · Anthony Minghella

The most beautiful film ever made about wanting to be somebody else.

Essential

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The Departments

Where to begin

The Gentleman's Canon
The essential pictures.
The films a Continental Man should have seen — chosen for character, atmosphere and craft, not because a critic once called them important.
Continental Cinema
Italy, France, Britain, Germany, the North.
Delon, Mastroianni, Belmondo, Gabin, Caine. Established classics and the European pictures almost nobody at your table will have seen.
Espionage
Beyond Bond.
Bond, le Carré, Cold War thrillers, double agents and intelligence dramas — for the man who wants his spying darker, smarter and rather more plausible.
The Criminal Gentleman
Mafia, heists, master thieves, elegant villains.
Great storytelling about men who chose the other side. We are interested in character and consequence, never in glamorising the trade.
Power & Money
Business, banking, dynasties, ambition.
Boardrooms, family empires and negotiation. The angle is psychological: how men hold status, and how they lose it.
War & History
Leadership, courage, strategy, empire.
Historical pictures worth an evening — chosen for character and command rather than ordnance.
Riviera Cinema
Côte d'Azur, Capri, Como, Sicily, Monaco.
Mediterranean glamour on film. Not every picture here is a masterpiece; atmosphere counts for a great deal.
The Well-Dressed Screen
Wardrobe worth studying.
Suits, dinner jackets, summer tailoring, sunglasses and watches — films that quietly improve the way a man dresses.
Cars on Film
Motor cars as characters.
Aston Martins, Alfas, Ferraris and the Mustang that changed San Francisco. Cross-referenced with the motoring pages.
Hotels, Villas & Locations
Where it was filmed, and whether you can stay there.
Grand hotels, Italian villas and the real addresses behind the frame — with the travel pages never far away.

Recently Screened

Films & television

The Criminal Gentleman · Film 1974
The Godfather Part II
A masterclass in parallel narratives, offering a profound exploration of legacy, power, and the corrosive nature of ambition across generations of the Corleone family.
Essential
The Criminal Gentleman · Film 1967
Le Samouraï
Alain Delon as Jef Costello, a contract killer whose meticulously ordered world unravels after a job goes awry. A study in isolation, precision, and existential cool.
Essential
Continental Cinema · Film 1949
The Third Man
Carol Reed’s atmospheric masterpiece of post-war Vienna, where shadows conceal truths and allegiances are as fluid as the Danube.
Essential
The Criminal Gentleman · Film 1995
Heat
A masterclass in urban procedure and the lives that orbit its unforgiving demands, Mann’s opus remains a benchmark.
Essential
The Gentleman's Canon · Film 1942
Casablanca
A timeless exploration of duty, romance, and sacrifice amidst the tumult of war, where choices resonate long after the final fade.
Essential
The Criminal Gentleman · Film 1984
Once Upon a Time in America
Leone's sprawling American elegy, a meditation on time, memory, and the dissolution of fraternal bonds amidst the rise and fall of Prohibition-era Jewish gangsters.
Essential
The Criminal Gentleman · Film 1990
Goodfellas
A masterclass in American gangster life, chronicling the rise and fall of Henry Hill with unflinching style and breathless pace.
Essential
The Well-Dressed Screen · Film 2017
Phantom Thread
A film about tailoring that is really a film about who is permitted to interrupt breakfast.
Essential
Espionage · Film 1973
The Day of the Jackal
Fred Zinnemann's meticulous procedural of an assassination attempt remains a masterclass in tension and understated elegance.
Essential