10 Best Danny Boyle Movies, According to IMDb (2025)

Danny Boyle has impressive range as a storyteller. His movies span many genres: musical (Yesterday), biopic (127 Hours, Steve Jobs), drama (Slumdog Millionaire, Trainspotting), sci-fi (Sunshine), thriller (Trance), and even zombie movies (28 Days Later). He has also directed for the stage and oversaw the opening ceremony at the 2012 London Olympics.

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His work makes for one of the most compelling filmographies of the last three decades, and more than earns Boyle his place in the pantheon of contemporary directors. It's unclear what movie Boyle will work on next (although there are rumors of a third 28 Days Later film), but it's bound to be yet another thoughtful, boundary-pushing project.

'Yesterday' (2019) - IMDb: 6.8/10

One of Boyle's more lighthearted films, Yesterday stars Himesh Patel as Jack, a struggling musician who wakes up one day to find that he is the only person on earth who can remember the Beatles' music. He passes the songs off as his own and quickly becomes an international music sensation. However, this newfound stardom also causes Jack a ton of problems.

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Yesterday is a sunny romantic comedy and a terrific vehicle for the Beatles' music. Patel sings and plays his own instruments, and does an excellent job with his covers of these iconic songs. Lily James is also charming as Jack's most dependable friend. As a result, the movie delivers plenty of sweet moments. There's one especially tender scene where Jack gets advice from an alternate-reality version of John Lennon. Fans of the Fab Four are sure to get a kick out of it.

'Trance' (2013) - IMDb: 6.9/10

Trance is a psychological thriller about an art theft gone wrong. A gang of thieves breaks into the gallery where Simon (James McAvoy) works as an auctioneer, hellbent on stealing Francisco Goya's painting The Witches in the Air. Simon takes emergency measures to hide the painting and is struck on the head by one of the robbers. They kidnap him and try to get the location of the artwork out of him, but Simon suffers from amnesia and can't remember where he stashed it.

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It's one of Boyle's smaller-scale projects, especially after his work on the 2012 Olympics. However, this is also Trance's charm. "I’m better working at a lower level of money really because I like that discipline of not having enough money to pull off whatever it is you want to pull off," Boyle explains. McAvoy gives a great performance, and Boyle's trademark dark humor is very much on display.

'T2 Trainspotting' (2017) - IMDb: 7.2/10

T2 Trainspotting is the sequel to Boyle's 1996 classic about drug addicts in Edinburgh. It takes place 21 years after Renton (Ewan McGregor) stole a large sum of drug money from his pals and hightailed it to Amsterdam. The original cast returns and is just as wild and engaging as they were the first time.

As with the original, there's a dark undercurrent beneath the whacky characters and bravura storytelling. "There is a lot of personal stuff in there too about loss, status, and atonement. It felt like a reason to make the film," Boyle told Esquire. The sequel had big shoes to fill, but more than lives up to its predecessor.

'Steve Jobs' (2015) - IMDb: 7.2/10

Boyle teamed up with Aaron Sorkin for this biopic about the larger-than-life Apple founder. As usual, Sorkin's dialogue is a delight. Seth Rogen is also hilarious as Steve Wozniak, and Kate Winslet is great as Jobs's confidant Joanna Hoffmann. However, the movie belongs to Michael Fassbender, who gives a committed performance, nailing Job's mannerisms and tone despite the lack of physical resemblance.

Boyle acknowledged the movie's historical inaccuracies, saying he was trying to capture the story's themes rather than the exact facts. He compared this approach to Shakespeare's reinterpretation of historical figures. "He would take some of the facts about a man of power and he would guess at a lot of the rest and just gotten away at actually getting at the human in it," Boyle said.

'Sunshine' (2007) - IMDb: 7.2/10

Sunshine takes place aboard a spacecraft a few decades in the future, as a crew of astronauts undertakes a mission to reignite the dying Sun. It stars an ensemble cast including Cillian Murphy, Rose Byrne, Chris Evans, and Michelle Yeoh, alongside Mark Strong as the captain who loses his mind and turns violent.

The film is an overt homage to classic sci-fis like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien, and the work of Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. "You can’t get away from Tarkovsky, Kubrick, or Ridley Scott because whichever angle you turn down in space travel, there they are," Boyle has said. It's a good blend of space opera and psychological thriller.

'Shallow Grave' (1994) - IMDb: 7.3/10

Boyle's feature debut was this black comedy about three flatmates who discover the new tenant dead alongside a large sum of money. They get rid of the body and decide to keep the cash for themselves, but things quickly go awry. Boyle and his crew used a real pile of one million pounds, which they rented for £1000 a day.

Shallow Grave works as a great prologue to Boyle's whole filmography, as it centers on one of his central themes: greed. Jean-Luc Godard quipped that all you need to make a movie was a girl and a gun. Boyle has joked that guns are harder to get hold of in the UK, so he's had to settle for cash instead. "A girl and a bag of money is what we do," he said.

'28 Days Later...' (2002) - IMDb: 7.5/10

Boyle followed up The Beach with one of the best zombie movies of all time. 28 Days Later centers on a group of survivors in a post-apocalyptic England after a virus turns people into flesh-eating ghouls. It represented a step forward for the subgenre and broke ground by introducing fast zombies.

Boyle released a sequel in 2007, which is just as solid. Annihilation director Alex Garland has reportedly written a script for a third movie in the series, with Boyle considering a return as director.

'127 Hours' (2010) - IMDb: 7.6/10

127 Hours tells the story of Aron Ralston, a mountain climber who became trapped under a boulder and had to resort to drastic measures to stay alive. It's essentially a one-man film, focusing on Ralston's days alone in the desert. The film is anchored by James Franco's intense, committed performance, for which he received a Best Actor Oscar nomination.

"This is a feature film that proves the cliché that no man is an island," Boyle says. "And that even in—especially in—the loneliest place in the world, it begins and ends with people. They're what sustained Aron, and they're who he speaks to on his camera."

'Slumdog Millionaire' (2008) - IMDb: 8.0/10

Boyle won the Oscar for this drama starring Dev Patel as a young man from the slums of Mumbai who wins the game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Using the quiz show as a framing device, the film cuts to flashbacks of Jamal's life that explain how he knows the answers. For the film, Boyle drew on his deep familiarity with Bollywood movies and almost exclusively cast Bollywood actors, Patel being a notable exception.

Boyle has said that he connected with the character of Jamal on first reading the original novel. "He's been through a lot. And what's wonderful about him, of course, is that unlike his brother, who - it has affected him," he has said. "His brother has turned to violence and vengeance, really, after the death of his mother. This kid has the grace to kind of see beyond it, to overcome it." Slumdog Millionaire was a sleeper hit, grossing over $378m against an $18m budget.

'Trainspotting' (1996) - IMDb: 8.1/10

Trainspotting is, hands down, Boyle's most beloved film. By turns darkly funny and tragic, it follows the lives of a group of heroin addicts living in a poor area of Edinburgh and their harebrained schemes to make money. It packs an irreverent mix of bleak subject matter, black comedy, and energetic, stylized filmmaking. The actors shine, each in their own way, and Ewan McGregor delivers one of his all-time best and most complex performances.

However, Boyle has dismissed claims that Trainspotting is primarily a drug film. "It's really concerned with the recklessness of that age we all go through when you don't care about anything really, and the risks you take because of it. There's that bravado as you emerge out of childhood, and the first film is a celebration of that, rather than it being a social-realist heroin film," he explains.

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