Popular reviews

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  Review by Sally Jane Black 2

  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…

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  Review by cuckoochanel ★★★★ 10

  The closeup is used to great effect in Mike Leigh’s All or Nothing, a slice-of-life drama following a weekend in the lives of three of London’s working-class families. The performances are gritty and harrowingly realistic, and each character’s face is examined in detail, one likeness after the other vulnerably sacrificed for scrutiny.

  Phil, played by a slack-jawed, almost stunned Timothy Spall, is a melancholy minicab driver and dime-store philosopher haunted by his own inadequacy; his dazed and pitiful expressions give way to mumbled testaments that usually confound his audience. He’s the common-law husband to tired, loveless Penny (a girlishly frail Lesley Manville), who is a ball of nervous energy, timid one moment and nagging the next. She is the breadwinner…

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  Review by Richard Chandler ★★★★ 11

  "It ain't about goin' on holiday! It's about week in week out gettin' by! It isn't a game!"

  With its steady focus on the interconnected lives of three working-class British families in a drab London housing project, Mike Leigh's All or Nothing could easily be construed as an anglicized, twenty-first century update on Krzysztof Kieślowski's monumental Dekalog. Leigh's primary focus is on the largest of the three family units. This first family consists of cabbie Phil (Timothy Spall), his grocery clerk girlfriend Penny (Leslie Manville) and their two obese young adult children Rory (James Corden) and Rachel (Alison Garland). Though everyone in the family excepting the sluggish Rory works for a living, they can still only eek out a meager…

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  Review by KYK ★★★★½

  timothy spall & lesley manville's convo toward the end destroyed me
  in a different way so did james corden calling broccoli "green cauliflower"

  is there, like, a 7-hour cut of this movie? cuz i would love to see it

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  Review by Mark Cunliffe 🇵🇸 ★★★★½

  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…

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  Review by Theo ★★★★½ 7

  Usual slice of no-frills, everyday realism from Mike Leigh, the quintessential filmmaker in chronicles of the working-class. Two hours of living the lives of those who are in hopeless and desperate situations - breathing their air, hemmed in by their claustrophobia, confined by their monotony and experiencing their turmoil. Multiple families all connected via a London council estate, exposed through multiple stories over the course of a few days, delving into the adversities they encounter, both internally and externally, discerned by the eyes of Leigh’s brilliantly insightful, realist lens. 

  It’s not an easy watch, and some may call it overtly bleak, but the trials and tribulations of these people are not easy, are often overtly bleak, which Leigh graciously doesn’t…

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  Review by Will Steele ★★★½

  Beyond a doubt this is Mike Leigh’s bleakest film purely for heavily featuring James Corden

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  Review by dylan gelula ★★★★★ 2

  if acting could be an art made tangible where you could hang its best stuff in a museum and someone put me in charge of that museum, i would be challenged to find a more worthy piece for it than the big ending scene between lesley manville and timothy spall. ive never seen two actors do that before where you can look in their eyes and you see all the way to the bottom.

  idk it just all gets so marinated in mike leigh movies. the characters get so steeped into their actor.

  you could just reach out and touch how they've grown to feel about each other for however many years. you can see their whole life lived! its insane

  special mention TS, as you never get to see male actors snot-cry in movies

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  Review by ♠ Benja ♠ ★★★★★

  Mike Leigh's writing, man, crazy. Every time I watch one of his films, I fall in love more and more with his craft, especially his writing. I get awe-struck with the realism he achieves in his films, I completely forget I'm watching a film, and despite not living/being from Britain, I feel that I'm peeping through a window and watching someone's life unfold.

  The core of "All or Nothing" is a recurrent one in Leigh's filmography, a look into Britain's working class. Leigh acknowledges this reality once again and crafts a journey into the day-to-day life of a misfortuned family, a journey that is sensitive and bleak, throat knot and cramped chest bleak, a journey that puts us in the…

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  Review by fran hoepfner ★★★½

  borderline unwatchable in its bleakness. it's insane that Leigh wanted to follow up something as emotionally robust as Topsy-Turvy with... this? I guess? lots of folks pushing steamed peas around their plate going "life's shit, innit?" etc. all the Leigh regulars are great - Spall, Manville, Ruth Sheen MVP with her enduring tenderness and optimism in the face of it all. a film I would recommend to almost no one! I will maintain my increasingly unpopular opinion that James Corden is a great actor.

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  Review by Chris ★★★★ 8

  All or Nothing is a sorrowful portrait of the struggles faced by working class people on a day-to-day basis when barely making ends meet forces survival to become the main priority, necessitating that vital aspects of familial life like care and affection are to be neglected which causes deep-rooted despondency. Mike Leigh always provides an unflinching yet compassionate touch to this type of subject matter, but even for him this is a heartbreaking effort. Every character here suffers from varying feelings of inadequacy or hopelessness, all of them unable to find satisfactory ways to release the emotions they've bottled up inside themselves so they lash out in aggression or they allow despair to permeate their every thought. It all breeds…

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  Review by Mark Cunliffe 🇵🇸 ★★★★½ 2

  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…