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…

Few directors can capture working-class Britain as well as Mike Leigh can, and his directorial strengths are easy to pick up in All or Nothing, a bleak but nicely written film.

It follows three families, all living in the same South London housing estate. They all have their own ways and problems while getting by: a gentle taxi driver tries to contemplate silently; his foul-mouthed, lazy son suffers a heart attack; his sister longs for affection while working in a retirement home; a young pregnant teenager fights with her abusive boyfriend; her bestie is stalked by a creepy resident; his father struggles as a clumsy driver, etc. It's a tangled web of troubles and dilemmas, but it's all very human,…