A bespectacled wise-cracker, who only communicates through corny jokes, courts the affections of a shop assistant, who – when not getting her hair done by a chatty hairdresser – is forever talking about bodily complaints. Short and sweet, with excellent performances from David Thewlis and Sylvestra Le Touzel (as the courting couple), Alison Steadman (as the hairstylist), and Wendy Nottingham (as her sullen daughter,) Leigh’s slice-of-life drama proves delightful.Read More »
Synopsis:
A faddishly earthy bourgeois couple travels into the country for a camping and walking holiday, but comes unstuck amongst the great unwashed. After a less-than-promising start, they befriend a trainee P.E. teacher from Cardiff, and all proceeds peacefully. However, when a pair of boisterous Brummies arrives at the campsite, clashing personalities soon see tensions rise to the point of violence, in Leigh’s riotously funny telefilm. Winning performances, instantly quotable dialogue, and potent social satire combine to enormously entertaining effect.
— Iain Stott (An Ozu a Day…)Read More »
From the Guardian:
Home Sweet Home: The tragic-comic tale of a lonely postman, the social workers who chivvy him about his estranged teenage daughter, and his secret affairs with the wives of his fellow postmen.Read More »
From DVD Times:
A young working-class couple, Dick and Mandy, move into a council house, to find their old teacher living next door with his wife. Their new life is plagued by endless visits from Mandy’s lonely elder sister Gloria, a situation that finally erupts into a major catastrophe involving the neighbours.Read More »
Synopsis:
The quiet desperate life of a secretary and her retarded sister depicted in a halting sequence of improvised fragments. The uncompromising cinematic debut of British director Mike Leigh
Review:
“Might be too bleak a look at reality for some but it nevertheless is an uncompromising way of brilliantly telling its harrowing story.”Read More »
Quote:
Mike Leigh’s brilliant and controversial Naked stars David Thewlis as Johnny, a charming, eloquent, and relentlessly vicious drifter on the lam in London. Rejecting all those who would care for him, the volcanic Johnny hurls himself into a nocturnal odyssey through the city, colliding with a succession of the desperate and the dispossessed, and scorching everyone in his path. With a virtuoso script and raw performances from Thewlis and costars Katrin Cartlidge and Lesley Sharpe, Leigh’s panorama of England’s crumbling underbelly is a showcase of black comedy and doomsday prophecy, and was the winner of the best director and actor prizes at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival.Read More »
Quote:
In Mike Leigh’s poignant, deceptively modest follow-up to his international triumph SECRETS & LIES, former college roommates Hannah (Katrin Cartlidge) and Annie (Lynda Steadman) meet again for the first time in six years. The reunion takes them back and forth in a journey through time as they reflect on who they were, who they’ve become, and the complicated history that they share together. With a mix of tender humor and piercing human insight, Leigh offers an intimate, quietly affecting portrait of a friendship weathering the ups, downs, and surprises that life brings.Read More »