Rye Lane

Raine Allen-Miller's first feature premiered at Sundance in January 2023 and arrived on BBC Film and BFI money as the most stylistically confident British debut in years. Written by Nathan Bryon and Tom Melia, it belongs to the one-day romance tradition — Before Sunrise is the reference everyone reached for — relocated to Peckham and Brixton and shot as though the genre had never been allowed colour before.

David Jonsson plays Dom, recently and comprehensively dumped, and Vivian Oparah plays Yas, who overhears him crying in a toilet cubicle at an art show and decides to adopt him for the afternoon. Olan Collardy shot it on wide-angle and fisheye lenses that bend the market stalls and the estate walkways into something closer to a musical set, and the production design keeps the palette at full saturation throughout. Colin Firth turns up uncredited, running a burrito stand called Love Guac'tually.

It holds 98% on Rotten Tomatoes from 137 reviews and a 3.91 Letterboxd average across 189,000 ratings — numbers that put it among the best-received British films of the decade — and it took the Toronto Film Critics Association's Best First Feature prize with a BAFTA nomination for Outstanding British Film. At eighty-two minutes it is also the most efficient thing in the catalogue: a romantic comedy that trusts its two leads and gets out before anyone tires of them.