Recent British cinema has produced films stretching from heritage films to kitchen sink realism. The main differences between these poles lies in the classes described – bourgeoisie and aristocracy in heritage films vs. working class in kitchen sink realism -, and in the mise en scène  – high-quality visual production values for heritage films vs. the simplicity, banality and avoidance of carefully constructed plots or settings for kitchen sink realism. In this paper, I will analyze two films, one from each one of these two categories: Peter Greenaway’s Goltzius and the Pelican Company (2012), representing the heritage tradition, and Shane Meadows’s Dead Man’s Shoes (2004), representing kitchen sink realism. None of the films could be considered as ideal examples of their class though. Greenaway’s film describes an older period than usually do heritage films (the sixteenth century), and does it in ways that combines naturalistic and extremely lavish settings. It can be seen as an example of what Claire Monk (2002) calls ‘post-heritage films’, that is films which adopt a less naturalistic, even anachronistic approach to screening narratives set in the past. Meadows’s film is basically social-realistic, but has a twist which elevates it to a mythical level which is far from typical of kitchen sink realism. One of the things which complicate, in both cases, the classification is the use of biblical motifs. Consequently, I will analyze the use of these based on Lars Elleström’s model of media transformation (2014). A close look on whether certain scenes are to be considered as cases of media transformation or transmediation (Elleström 2014) shows that Greenaway’s film deconstructs the religious motif, whereas Meadows’s film, on the contrary, constructs it in unexpected and subtle ways. In both cases, however, different intermedial strategies are used in sophisticated ways in relation to religious motifs, something that deserves a closer analysis.