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…

Mi aspettavo un dramma peso e indigeribile e mi sono ritrovato invece un film abbastanza lieve e paraculo. Sia chiaro, non c'è un briciolo di commedia in queste due ore di depressione, eppure l'uso degli stereotipi strappa spesso un sorriso a labbra strette. La depressione cronica e scema di Phil, il suo vagare incoerente e i suoi monologhi da quattro soldi, il suo mutismo autistico e la spiantatezza da citrullo, ne fanno quasi una macchietta. Messo di peso all'interno di un contesto tutto femminile, è un personaggio seviziato dall'incapacità di crescere e di mettersi sulle spalle una famiglia. D'altro canto nessuno pare avere bisogno di lui: è talmente schiacciato nella sua stessa quinta di scena che quando finalmente sbotta nessuno…

Dreary, dilapidated, and dirty, Leigh sets the scene for his dour working class drama with sharp precision and proceeds to fill it with characters so richly textured that they spring forth from the stereotyped and maligned class they represent to spring forth as individuals worthy of our emotional investment. This ability to evoke empathy and understanding is the crux of Leigh's empathetic filmmaking, elevating his dramas above miserablism to or sociological potraiture to tell sincere stories about the lives of the disillusioned, depressed, and marginalized, evocatively expressing the all consuming malaise of poverty and the ways the constant strain of getting by places on the psyche and relationships. Despite the hardships of poverty, the greatest fear is of lonliness, the…