Kingsman: The Secret Service

Matthew Vaughn's Kingsman: The Secret Service opened in 2014 and became one of the most commercially successful British genre films of its decade, over $410 million worldwide gross. Adapted from Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons's The Secret Service comic-book series, the film consolidated Vaughn, after his earlier Kick-Ass (2010) and X-Men: First Class (2011), as one of the most internationally consequential British genre directors of his generation.

A London council-estate kid named Eggsy (Taron Egerton, in his star-launching lead) is recruited into the Kingsman (a private, Savile-Row-tailored, off-the-books British intelligence service) by the old-school agent Harry Hart, codename Galahad (Colin Firth, in unexpected action-leading-man register). Eggsy is sent through the agency's brutal recruitment programme just as a tech-billionaire named Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson) reveals an ambitious plan to address what he describes as humanity's overpopulation crisis. Mark Strong plays Hart's mentor Merlin; Sofia Boutella plays Valentine's lethal chief enforcer Gazelle.

The film operates as a deliberately broad gentleman-spy parody, sending up the conventions of the Bond franchise while delivering a high-energy action-comedy in its own register. The lengthy church-shootout sequence, choreographed to Lynyrd Skynyrd's Free Bird, became one of the most-cited single-take action sequences of 2010s commercial cinema. Two sequels and a prequel-spinoff have extended the franchise.