Time Bandits

Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits (1981) was the former Monty Python animator's breakthrough as a director and the first instalment of his loose "Trilogy of Imagination", followed by Brazil and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. A wild, anarchic fantasy aimed at children and adults alike, it became a surprise international hit.

Craig Warnock plays the young Kevin, spirited away through portals in history by a gang of time-travelling dwarfs, in an adventure that mixes slapstick, real menace and Gilliam's trademark hand-built spectacle. The cast is studded with stars: Sean Connery as a kindly King Agamemnon, John Cleese as a frightfully polite Robin Hood, David Warner as the gleeful embodiment of Evil and Ralph Richardson as the Supreme Being. The production design teems with the cluttered, baroque invention that would define Gilliam's work.

Under the romp runs a streak of darkness and a satirical edge, aimed at consumerism, parental neglect and the indifference of cosmic powers, that is unusual for a family film, and it has kept audiences arguing for decades. For a generation of children who discovered it early, Time Bandits is a formative favourite, and it remains one of the most imaginative fantasy films of the eighties, and it was the first full flowering of the maximalist, hand-built imagination that would go on to define all of Gilliam's cinema.