Heritage film is a critical term to refer to a cluster or cycle of late 20th-century British films that were argued to depict the United Kingdom of the pre-World War II decades in a nostalgic fashion. Although this term was originally used to discuss the film genre polemically, its use has broadened out, and it is now also used more loosely to refer to period films with high-quality visual production values, including those produced in France, other European countries and beyond.