42 single-location movies that made the most of what they had

Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat was accused of being a propaganda win for the Nazis, as diverse members of a ship and the U-boat it collided with hunker down in the vessel of the title. The characters were so cut off Hitch could only cameo in the "Before" and "After" pics in a newspaper advertisement.

Hitchcock didn't just restrain himself to one set with this film, he also shot the thing in real time and kept it to a single 80-minute take! The black comedy of the 1929 Patrick Hamilton play shines through – two Harvard graduates argue that murder can be art as they attempt to pull off the perfect crime.

What is it with Hitchcock and solo locations? Rear Window sees a photographer (Jimmy Stewart) with a broken leg spy on his neighbours, becoming convinced that one of them has murdered his wife.

Hands up, the film does contain outside scenes at the start and end, but 12 Angry Men so embodies a single-location film we had to include it, as the male jurors of the title squabble in the deliberation room.

Called So Close to Life in the UK, Ingmar Bergman's Swedish drama sees three pregnant women who share a hospital room re-evaluating their lives.

Prison drama Le Trou has four inmates planning an elaborate breakout to escape their long sentences. When they induct a new inmate to join their scheme, it leads to distrust and uncertainty and ratchets up the tension.

Audrey Hepburn is the blind woman being harassed by criminals looking for a doll stuffed with drugs in her apartment, which sounds like a gag in Deadpool to us.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's adaptation of his own play almost totally restricts its drama to the bedroom in Petra's apartment, as she laments her relationships with the men in her life with an all-female cast.

Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine are the sparring crime writer and Casanova who play deadly games in a large country manor house filled with automata.

When two wannabe bank robbers (Al Pacino and John Cazale) fail spectacularly and are surrounded by police, they camp out in the building and hold the workers hostage. The script is based on a Life magazine article titled The Boys in the Bank, about a real-life 1972 heist in Brooklyn.

Café des Artistes in Manhattan is the location as Andre (Andre Gregory) and Wally (Wallace Shawn) play fictionalised versions of themselves, as their experimental production questions the very nature of theatre and film.

Öszi almanach has no association to The Kinks song but finds a rich elderly woman, her son, her nurse, her nurse's discontented lover and a new lodger revealing their darkest secrets, fears, obsessions and hostilities in a grim, claustrophobic apartment.

Detention, we remember it well. It was never as much fun as this seminal John Hughes movie starring Emilio Estevez, Anthony Michael Hall, Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy, which sees the five teens working through the wider issues in their lives.

This comedy based on the mystery board game Cluedo (Clue in the US) takes place in a secluded New England mansion and is noted for featuring three separate endings.

Tough cop John McClane gets to wander the whole of Nakatomi Plaza (the iconic Fox Plaza in Los Angeles), but finds that the building just isn't big enough for him and a group of terrorists as he takes them on in this smart action thriller.

Kevin Smith's excellent black-and-white indie comedy, which launched his career, rarely steps outside the store where the staff of the title work. 

This three-hander from Roman Polanski sees a woman who was previously held by the state (Sigourney Weaver) come to believe that the man (Ben Kingsley) she has welcomed into her home during a storm is her torturer. Awks!

Four directors (Allison Anders, Alexandre Rockwell, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino) come together to tell connected stories set in a hotel where the bell boy (Tim Roth) is having an incredibly eventful night.