Perhaps the greatest strength Mike Leigh's films have are their casts. He finds people who are beautiful without the traditional magazine sheen, and he casts them with all of their flaws and quirks and sad eyes in things that draw from reality rather than fantasy. This is a film filled with sorrows and a weariness that is at times difficult to watch. Melodramas are supposed to be larger than life, full of huge emotions that emphasize the intensity of human interaction, derived from events as big as the emotional content. Leigh's film should be a melodrama--it has a few events that seem like they should be the focal point of some Sirkian or Fassbinderian* sprawl--but it comes across instead not…

Let's commence this review by saying that Mike Leigh believes Jonathan Ross to be a bit of a twat, and that I'm inclined to agree with him.

On release of All or Nothing, Ross used both his Daily Mirror film review column and his BBC1 show Film (2002) to implore audiences to stay away from this film. He claimed it was a complete downer full of people that no one would want to see on the cinema screen.

It's a stance that completely missed the point and, apropos of nothing, I wonder if Ross is a fan of EastEnders (he's certainly had several of that programme's actors appear on his TV and radio chat shows down the years showering them…

Leigh wanders into lesser charted territory with a dark film that is near as depressing as they come. His signature humor is vacant and replaced with a somber chord. But the one aspect that remains and probably always will with Mike Leigh is the human element. Nobody can depict humanity in its grim, quirky, loving, beautiful and unpredictable ways as he.

All or Nothing is a very heavy film to carry for the viewer. The kind I may warn people about beforehand of how it can make one feel so run down after watching. The characters and their situations as expressed are so genuine and lifelike that its impossible not to feel their emotional wrought and anguish. While many may…

Leigh's worldview is largely economic, visualized in survivalist terms where resources are scarce, desperation is thick, and the reality of needing money is about as bare as finding loose change in the sofa. His focus is on the British working class, those on the economic fringes, generally targeted at the bottom of the caste or those tenuously treading water in the middle. So monotonous is the daily grind, in fact, that people have lost their ability to forge meaningful connections, express their love for each other, or escape the dramas that ubiquitously surround them. Unemployment, domestic abuse, alcoholism, obesity and unwanted pregnancies form the language of Leigh's raw, economically blighted world, and while none of this is particularly new territory…

One of Mike Leigh's most overlooked and underrated features, All or Nothing was unfairly dismissed by critics upon release (chief among them Jonathan Ross, as my previous review points out) and I have a theory as to why. In the New Labour led Britain of the early '00s, the middle-class London bubble of Tony's People didn't want to believe that people like the ones depicted here existed (or be reminded of them), so it was far better to rubbish such a depiction rather than acknowledge its reality. Leigh's film didn't fit the progressive message that everything was better now that the Tories had gone, a PR spin myth that conveniently ignored the fact that New Labour kept many a Tory…

Mike Leigh's "All or Nothing" looks behind three doors in a South London public housing estate and finds loneliness, desperation and a stubborn streak of spunky humor. His characters try to remember a time when they were light-hearted and had hope. But there is little to cheer them now, except for food and sleep, the telly, the pub on Saturday night and, for the young, thoughtless sex to hurry them along into raising thankless kids of their own.

Phil Bassett, played by the sad-faced and wounded Timothy Spall, is a minicab driver who stares straight ahead as dramas unfold in his back seat. His common-law wife, Penny (Lesley Manville), is a checkout clerk at the Safeway. They have two fat,…

This one hits close to home. It is easy to show people, harder to develop them, harder still to understand them. Mike Leigh seems to understand everybody. His filmography consists of characters of many different personalities and dispositions, all of them exceedingly complex. It's an extraordinary talent, and one that baffles me; someone could live a thousand lives and still not possess such a broad scope of understanding. Any one person would find something of themselves or the people they know in one of Leigh's films. they might recognise the misanthropic self-destruction of Johnny in Naked in a friend, or find the bubbly, optimistic nature of Poppy in Happy-Go-Lucky evokes memories of their favourite primary school teacher. In this sense,…

One of Mike Leigh's most overlooked and underrated features, All or Nothing was unfairly dismissed by critics upon release (chief among them Jonathan Ross, as my previous review points out) and I have a theory as to why. In the New Labour led Britain of the early '00s, the middle-class London bubble of Tony's People didn't want to believe that people like the ones depicted here existed (or be reminded of them), so it was far better to rubbish such a depiction rather than acknowledge its reality. Leigh's film didn't fit the progressive message that everything was better now that the Tories had gone, a PR spin myth that conveniently ignored the fact that New Labour kept many a Tory…

Leigh's worldview is largely economic, visualized in survivalist terms where resources are scarce, desperation is thick, and the reality of needing money is about as bare as finding loose change in the sofa. His focus is on the British working class, those on the economic fringes, generally targeted at the bottom of the caste or those tenuously treading water in the middle. So monotonous is the daily grind, in fact, that people have lost their ability to forge meaningful connections, express their love for each other, or escape the dramas that ubiquitously surround them. Unemployment, domestic abuse, alcoholism, obesity and unwanted pregnancies form the language of Leigh's raw, economically blighted world, and while none of this is particularly new territory…