RocknRolla

RocknRolla was Guy Ritchie's return to the British gangster film after the costly experiments of Swept Away and Revolver. Released in 2008, it played as a self-conscious continuation of the world he had made his name with in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, but updated for the post-millennium London of Russian oligarchs and property speculation, themes that had reshaped the city's economy across the 2000s.

The cast pulls together a generation of British actors who would scatter into the global blockbuster economy soon after: Tom Hardy in one of his last UK-only roles before Bronson, Idris Elba between The Wire and his American breakout, Mark Strong in early form, Gerard Butler at the peak of his star period, with Toby Kebbell, Thandiwe Newton and Karel Roden in support. Cinematography is by David Higgs and the score is by Steve Isles. Hardy and Elba would re-team in larger international productions multiple times in the years afterwards.

The film was a moderate commercial success and the planned sequel was never produced, in part because of Ritchie's pivot to the Sherlock Holmes blockbusters with Robert Downey Jr. RocknRolla is now treated as the closing entry of Ritchie's first London-gangster cycle and as a transitional document of mid-2000s London, a city the film portrays at exactly the moment its luxury-property economy was about to crash with the global financial crisis.