Hot Fuzz

Edgar Wright's Hot Fuzz opened in 2007 as the second film of the Cornetto Trilogy after Shaun of the Dead (2004) and before The World's End (2013). The film consolidated Wright, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost as the most internationally consequential British comic creative collaboration of their generation; the trilogy's combined cultural reach has continued to expand across the intervening years.

London's top police officer Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg, in his most carefully calibrated performance of the trilogy), so effective at his job that the metropolitan force has come to resent him, is transferred against his will to the sleepy Gloucestershire village of Sandford, winner of the Village of the Year award an unbroken sequence of times. There Angel is partnered with the genial, large-framed Constable Danny Butterman (Nick Frost), the son of the local Inspector. As Angel struggles with the absence of any apparent crime in the village, a string of grisly accidents begins to suggest that Sandford may not be exactly what it appears.

Wright's commitment to a register of action-cinema parody (fast-cutting Tony Scott-style editing applied to mundane village-life sequences (the supermarket-shelf-stocking sequence is one of the most-cited)) and the film's broader satirical reach into English village social conservatism produced one of the most-quoted British comedies of its decade. Jim Broadbent, Timothy Dalton and Bill Nighy anchor the substantial supporting British cast.