The Beach

Danny Boyle followed Trainspotting and A Life Less Ordinary with an adaptation of Alex Garland's 1996 novel, made by his own Figment Films with Fox money and Leonardo DiCaprio in his first lead after Titanic. It was a substantial commercial success and the film that ended Boyle's working relationship with Ewan McGregor, who had expected the part.

DiCaprio plays Richard, a backpacker who reaches a hidden lagoon on a Thai island where a self-selected community has organised itself around not being found. Virginie Ledoyen and Guillaume Canet play the French couple who travel with him, and Tilda Swinton is Sal, who runs the place. Darius Khondji shot it, the soundtrack is peak-era electronica — Moby, Underworld, All Saints — and the production became notorious in Thailand for bulldozing and replanting part of Maya Bay, which took two decades and a tourist ban to recover.

Critics were hostile: it holds 21% on Rotten Tomatoes, with most reviews arguing that the film keeps the novel's setup and loses its argument about what backpackers are actually doing. It has since acquired a following that reads it as a period document — the tail end of the 1990s, when the idea of an undiscovered place still seemed plausible — and Garland's own 28 Days Later screenplay for Boyle followed two years later.