LOCK, STOCK AND TWO SMOKING BARRELS (1998)

A former pop promo director with big-screen ambitions, the 28-year-old Guy Ritchie burst on to the scene with this highly stylised account of East End chancers and bully boy enforcers. The movie, which begat an entire genre of mockney gangster wannabes, opened with a thumping Ocean Colour Scene soundtrack, while London bobbies chased Jason Statham and Nick Moran through the back streets in slow-mo. It was all very Cool Britannia.

SNATCH (2000)

Lock, Stock was a smash. Ritchie, now the toast of Hollywood, cast the glamourpuss A-lister Brad Pitt in his bravura follow-up, Snatch. The movie pitched a typically mixed bunch of hardmen – including Franky Four Fingers (Benicio Del Toro) and Boris the Blade (Rade Serbedzija) – into a cheeky convoluted narrative that involved a diamond robbery and culminated in a bare-knuckled boxing bout with Pitt’s mumbling Irish traveller Mickey O’Neil.

SWEPT AWAY (2002)

The newly married Ritchie here tapped his softer side, but with cataclysmic results. He cast his famous spouse, Madonna, as an arrogant millionaire who gets marooned on a deserted Mediterranean island with an abrasive young commoner (Adriano Giannini), but eventually falls for his roughhewn charms (art imitating life?). The tone was strange, Madonna’s performance was stiff, and the movie tanked.

REVOLVER (2005)

An ambitious attempt by Ritchie to return, and yet not, to his mockney roots, Revolver was a pseudo-philosophical head-trip of a movie that included all the gangster staples – hardmen, crooked deals, gunfights – but entirely without context. Set in a fantasy Neverland between Vegas and Mile End, and featuring a relentlessly pretentious voiceover from the card-sharp protagonist Jason Statham, the movie is dreamlike and stylish, but makes little sense.

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