Get the most out of your Sky Q subscription with these top 4K TV and movie picks.
You’ve got the 4K TV, you’ve coughed up for a Sky Q UHD-ready premium set-top box, and now you’re looking for something great to show off all those pixels with.
Great news! If you’ve signed up for Sky’s 2TB Sky Q box with a Sky Q multiscreen subscription, you’re good to go, getting access to the suite of 4K films and TV shows Sky is currently curating. It’s usually a £34 a month deal (including rental of the box), but is currently down to £32 a month.
There’s a growing selection of top-notch films on the service, with the library growing all the time, and Sky pumping more and more money into presenting its own original programming in 4K too. Note you’ll have to download 4K content in advance of watching it, rather than streaming it – so if you’ve got a slower broadband connection, you may want to get some of these downloading well in advance of settling down to watch them. Depending on the film and length, they can be many gigabytes in size.
So, without further ado, let’s kick off with the best 4K films on Sky Q right now. Click through for a few quick TV show selections, too.
What a surprisingly-excellent sequel this was! Where the first film took the found-footage genre to new sci-fi fuelled heights, 10 Cloverfield Lane dials it right back for a laser-focused thriller, set in an emergency bunker. John Goodman is frighteningly good as the bunker’s oppressive overseer, fearing an unknown outside danger. You’ll be biting your nails throughout, with every micro-expression revealed in 4K.
Steven Spielberg takes on the heart-wrenching tale of the slave ship La Amistad in this historical drama from 1997. Following a revolt by the slaves in 1839, a group of Mende tribesmen took control of the ship of their captors, before being recaptured and facing trial at the Supreme Court in 1841. An all-star cast, including Anthony Hopkins, Morgan Freeman and a young Matthew McConaughey give the subject matter the gravitas it deserves, with the painstakingly recreated historical setting looking great in 4K.
A superhero film with dick jokes. Give the people what they wanted, Deadpool certainly did. While it’s perhaps not as refined as the finest of the Marvel flicks (it’s a Fox production) it’s certainly one of the funnier, in a toilet-humor sort of way. The first full length flick centered on the ‘Merc with the mouth’, it’s a gory, zany action flick, with showstopping set pieces to really show your UHD TV off with.
You can’t handle the truth! Or the amount of pixels this 4K remaster of the 1992 courtroom drama is going to push into your eyeballs. Jack Nicholson is on top form making even the always-great-if-an-easy-target-for-ridicule Tom Cruise pale in comparison. It’s a solid 4K overhaul, too (even if a courtroom isn’t the most visually-arresting of settings).
It’s as cheesy as a mouse’s bank vault, but there’s still something heart-warming about Tom Hanks as the loveable, simple, straight talking man ambling his way from one life-changing adventure to another. Pure popcorn fodder, the era-spanning scenes make for a lovely 4K watch.
It was unfairly boycotted by some more closed-minded corners of the internet, but the all-female reboot of the Ghostbusters franchise wasn’t half bad. What it lacked in belly-laugh concentration it made up for with heart, spruced-up special effects and the always-excellent Kristen Wiig. The furore around the casting overshadowed the film sadly, and it’d be good to see the franchise one day continue. For now though, this colorful comedy horror makes a great showcase subject for Sky Q’s 4K abilities.
Francis Ford Coppola’s mafia trilogy, often imitated, never bettered. Except for maybe that third film, which is a bit of a mess to be honest. But forget that! The first two films in the Corleone saga are fantastic, showing how trust and family bonds can be built and broken over the course of a life in crime. A solid 4K remastering lets the films shine like the day they were first screened.
If you’ve never seen a Sergio Leone ‘Spaghetti’ western, then you’ve never really ever seen a western. Harsh, brooding and uncompromising, he brought the grit and the sweat to a genre that had never previously cared about the dubious morality of the old West. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, starring Clint Eastwood, is a re-imagining of the Kurosawa classic Yojimbo, with a wandering stranger dangerously playing two rival families off each other for financial gain. It’s a striking film (Leone being the master of the super-close-up) and is a great showcase for your Sky Q box.
One of the finest comedies of all time, Groundhog Day is one of the finest comedies of all time. One of the finest comedies of all time, Groundhog Day sees Bill Murray forced to live the same day over and over again in a quest to live the perfect 24 hours in what’s one of the finest comedies of all time. It looks great in 4K, and is one of the finest comedies of all time.
Show me the money! Or the 4K pixels, whatever is easiest. Perhaps the defining Tom Cruise film? It’s either this or Top Gun, but Jerry Maguire shows him at the height of his Hollywood star power. Starring a the eponymous sports agent struggling to make it on his own, it’s a bit of a schmaltzy romance by the end, if an eminently quotable one. A great 4K feel-good flick.
One of the all-time greats, and one of the films that everyone should see at least once in their lifetimes. Ideally, you’d watch it first on the biggest, most luxurious cinema screen you can to get the full epic experience. But a giant 4K screen will make a great alternative. Mind-bogglingly ambitious, beautiful to watch and featuring a career-best performance from Peter O’Toole it’s a masterpiece, expertly telling of T. E Lawrence’s time in the Arabian peninsula during World War I.
It defined the look of the future for a generation, and is a tentpole of modern sci-fi. And, thanks to some clever direction from Steven Spielberg, its visual effects hold up well under the added scrutiny of 4K pixel pushing. It’s a great thriller too, with future cop Tom Cruise on the run for a predicted crime he didn’t commit – and that hasn’t been committed yet.
Like baseball? Love spreadsheets? Then you’re going to adore Moneyball. Brad Pitt takes a struggling team to the top of the table with a little help from algorithm whizz Jonah Hill, crunching the numbers to find baseball’s most undervalued players. It revolutionised sports management, and makes for a pretty compelling (Oscar-winning) movie, too. It looks crisp in 4K, even if it’s not a visual dazzler full of UHD show-stopping set pieces. Other than Brad Pitt’s lovely face, of course.
What’s it take to win an Oscar? If you’re Leonardo DiCaprio, you need to grow a beard, crawl through a frozen wilderness, dribble a bit and eat raw offal. You can’t say he didn’t earn it! It’s a visceral performance, but far from the best thing about The Revenant – it’s beautifully shot, with the early frontiersman days of the United States brought to life with shocking, realism and sweeping landscapes. It looks phenomenal in 4K.
The franchise devolved into meaningless action-tripe after this first film (and don’t get us started on the remake) but the first RoboCop juggles many, many tonal plates gleefully. Horrifically, satirically violent, the story of a brutalised cop reborn as a cybernetic crime fighter is both a great action film and sharp social satire that holds up surprisingly well today.
The ultimate sports film? It’s certainly the king of the training montage. Stallone wrote and starred in this modern fable of the down-on-his luck boxer fighting to be a big-time contender and, along with First Blood, remains the highlight of his career.
