Theo James playing a duke who inherits a cannabis empire alongside his stately home may sound like the retirement plan for James Bond, lording around drinking martinis after a life of espionage. But as we near the end of the second season hype for Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen, there’s clearly a reason it’s quickly emerged as one of the most entertaining British series in years.
Season 2 arrived on Netflix in September 2026, expanding the increasingly chaotic world of Eddie Horniman and Susie Glass beyond the manicured confines of the British ruling class and across the channel into Europe and beyond.
If you’re like us and you’ve already torn through it, you're probably looking for something with the same particular cocktail: British criminals, expensive houses, questionable morals, charismatic villains, dry humour, and the occasional act of superfluous violence. Well, actually, we’ve already done that here: our list of Best British Crime Dramas.
No, this list is our homage to Guy Ritchie, the man who has spent almost three decades making films about criminals, conmen, gangsters, spies, aristocrats, and all the other poor bastards in between who get caught in the crossfire. So here it is: the best Guy Ritchie films you need to watch after The Gentlemen.
10. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
The first Sherlock Holmes already established Robert Downey Jr.'s version of the detective as a brilliantly unhinged action hero, with Jude Law's Watson providing the necessary ballast, so the sequel will always have the rather difficult job of sticking the landing.
That being said, A Game of Shadows is still a suitable follow-up – louder, sillier, potentially, increasingly ridiculous, but that is largely beside the point.
9. The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare
The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is a ridiculous Second World War adventure in which a collection of unusually capable British men are sent off to cause an unreasonable amount of trouble for the Nazis. Clearly, Ritchie understands his audience incredibly well.
Henry Cavill leads the ensemble as Gus March-Phillipps, alongside Alan Ritchson, Henry Golding, and Alex Pettyfer; so a decent line-up for what arrived with an arguably muted response. It’s not peak Ritchie, but perhaps that’s the trouble with having such a revered filmography in 2026. If I were rating each one of these releases, it'd get a generous 6.
8. Guy Ritchie's The Covenant
One of the more interesting films in Ritchie's later career is also one of his least recognisable – and one you’d be forgiven for missing despite its enviable audience score.
Instead of wisecracking gangsters within London’s seedy underbelly, The Covenant is incredibly American: Jake Gyllenhaal is US Army Sergeant John Kinley and Dar Salim plays an Afghan interpreter, Ahmed.
It’s a rather earnest depiction of war, something Ritchie hasn’t always attempted, but still carries many of the hallmarks one associates with the British director. It’s also one of Ritchie's best-reviewed films, with an 82% critics' score on Rotten Tomatoes and a 98% audience score. Now showing on Netflix Australia.
7. Wrath of Man
Jason Statham and Guy Ritchie have spent enough time together now to qualify as a cinematic partnership akin to Scorsese and De Niro, or Coogler and Jordan, ever since the British actor earned his breakout role in Ritchie’s Lock, Stock. Without the usual comedy that often precedes an all-out street brawl, Wrath of Man takes that relationship to its darkest territory yet.
As with most Statham movies, he’s arrived on the scene with an air of mystery, taking the job as the new security guard at an armoured truck company. What begins as a fairly standard cash-in-transit thriller gradually reveals itself to be something much nastier. It’s well worth a watch for fans of either Statham or Ritchie.
6. Sherlock Holmes
Before The Gentlemen graced our small screens, the only real taste of British aristocracy came in the form of Sherlock Holmes – a piece of established British intellectual property that just felt inherently made for Guy Ritchie.
I think Robert Downey Jr. deserves his flowers for where he took the role – ultimately under Ritchie’s direction – removing what many understood about the iconic detective and introducing audiences to a more eccentric bare-knuckle pugilist.
London is still the playground; only this time, Victorian England is the backdrop. It’s Guy Ritchie through and through.
5. RocknRolla
London property deals, Russian mobsters, corrupt businessmen, stolen money, and a criminal underworld where everybody knows somebody who needs to see a man about a dog, RocknRolla feels like the missing link between Ritchie's early gangster films and everything that came after.
The cast is stacked. No, really: Gerard Butler, Tom Wilkinson, Mark Strong, Idris Elba, Tom Hardy, and Toby Kebbell, with Ritchie returning to the multi-strand storytelling that made his early work so distinctive.
It was supposed to launch another chapter in the story, but RocknRolla performed so badly at the box office (making roughly US$25.7 million against an $18 million budget) that the sequel never arrived. Shame, it’s the closest thing to Snatch 2 that we ever got.
4. The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
Henry Cavill’s unofficial Bond audition is still one of my all-time favourite Ritchie flicks – easily one of the British director’s most underrated, and arguably his most stylish.
Set during the Cold War, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. pairs Henry Cavill's CIA agent Napoleon Solo with Armie Hammer's KGB operative Illya Kuryakin, forcing two men who would rather kill each other to work together against a common enemy.
Seeing as neither Cavill nor Ritchie got the 007 call-up, this beautifully dressed, globetrotting nonsense is the best possible outcome.
3. The Gentlemen
Ritchie has always been at his absolute beltering best when he’s given the world than when he is simply showing off inside one, and The Gentlemen is the clearest evidence.
No, not the Theo James release we’ve been binging all week; the OG. Matthew McConaughey, Charlie Hunnam, Colin Farrell, Hugh Grant. It’s peak Ritchie when he’s given free rein and a Netflix budget to match. If you've only seen the Netflix series, watch the film. If you've only seen the film, watch the series. This is the gateway drug.
2. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
This is where it all started – the blueprint that has informed every Guy Ritchie title since.
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels announced Guy Ritchie as a filmmaker with an incredibly unique view of the world, specifically contemporary criminals through the mean streets of the English capital, looking to engage in elaborate schemes across intersecting storylines and dialogue that has since become something of a calling card for the British director.
Made on a relatively modest budget in 1998, Lock, Stock also launched the careers of Jason Flemyng, Jason Statham, Nick Moran, Vinnie Jones, and Tom Hardy long before a career in Hollywood would make him a household name. In fact, I’m watching it again tonight.
1. Snatch
Snatch is Guy Ritchie's entire aesthetic compressed into 103 minutes: a stolen diamond, Irish Traveller fighters, Russian gangsters, London criminals, even Brad Pitt stumbling his way through the English language in only the way that he knows how. To this day, I’ve never heard someone attempt “d’ya like dags?” quite like Pitt’s Mickey O’Neil.
Remove Pitt from the equation, and the stacked cast is still ridiculous: Jason Statham, Benicio del Toro, Dennis Farina, Vinnie Jones, Stephen Graham, Jason Flemyng, and Alan Ford, all bouncing between overlapping schemes until the various pieces finally collide. Twenty-six years later, this non-negotiable remains the definitive Guy Ritchie film by which everything else on this list will be judged.