Mike Leigh
David Nice
A colleague once told me that I shouldn’t take Mike Leigh’s films with contemporary settings as slices of everyday life. He was right: they’re hyperreal. Especially Hard Truths, in which his take on a woman both depressed and angry – it’s possible to be both more or less simultaneously – packs years of grievances and unacceptable verbal abuse into a very short period of time.Fortunately Marianne Jean-Baptiste is on hand to elevate the attacks to sacred monster level – plenty of laugh-out-loud lines, and I won’t spoil what fun's to be had by quoting any – and to make the pathos real. Pansy‘s Read more ...
graham.rickson
That Bleak Moments exists at all is largely due to Albert Finney; the BFI funded Mike Leigh’s 1971 debut to the tune of £100, as an "experimental film", and Finney’s production company supplied the rest of the £18,000 budget. Shot on location in suburban South London, Bleak Moments looks incredibly assured and confident.Leigh complains about the quality of the soundtrack in an entertaining bonus commentary, but this pristine BFI reissue looks pristine and sounds ideally clear. Tulse Hill has rarely looked so desolate, cinematographer Bahram Manoochehri eerily accentuating the shadows. The Read more ...
Justine Elias
Naked (1993), the fifth and finest feature film written and directed by Mike Leigh, remains a searing, eerily prescient look at Britain on the verge of a social and economic breakdown.Maybe even a verbal breakdown, too, for Leigh, unlike any other filmmaker, has an ear for drawing out compelling characters from their distinctive modes of expression. Where so many other British films draw obvious lines between class with emphasis on accents, Leigh’s characters have an inimitable way of winding up words until they shatter.Though Leigh’s work – which spans 56 years of stage, television, and Read more ...
David Nice
When ENO announced its return to Gilbert and Sullivan, rapture at the news that Mike Leigh, genius Topsy-Turvy director, would be the master of wonderland ceremonies was modified by its choice, The Pirates of Penzance. Last staged at the Coliseum – and unmemorably – as recently as 2004, the fifth Savoy opera seemed less in need of revisiting than several larger-scale successors. By the end of last night, though, it was clear not only that Leigh and his musical team had been the best possible choice to tackle this work of classical perfection, but also that if operatic schedules could be Read more ...
David Nice
Nothing pinpoints the Oscars' absurdity more than the absences of Mike Leigh’s masterpiece as Best Film candidate, of Timothy Spall from the Best Actor list - New York and London critics as well as Cannes made some amends – and even of Marion Bailey, Leigh’s partner, from the nominations for Best Supporting Actress. Spall fulfils the promise of his King Lear moment in Secrets and Lies as the artist described by Leigh as a "complex, curmudgeonly, convoluted character".Tenacious Dickensian dialogue – surely not all improvised, Leigh-style? – allows Spall to shine or appal in love, bereavement, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
There's been much talk about Late Turner, to co-opt the name of the exhibition now on view at Tate Britain covering the last 16 years in the English artist JMW Turner's singular career. And as if perfectly timed to chime with those canvases in celluloid terms is Mr Turner, the ravishing film that stands as a testimonial to what one might call Late Leigh. The writer-director Mike Leigh has made period pieces before, most notably Topsy-Turvy in 1999, but even by his own exalted standards this cinematic profile of one artist by another stands a league apart.And just as Topsy-Turvy was as Read more ...
David Benedict
Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party: comedy classic or Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with added sneering? Ever since its first appearance on stage in 1977 and its subsequent record-breaking broadcast as a BBC Play for Today with an eye-widening 16 million viewers (not to mention those watching the subsequent DVD), there has been disagreement. Depending on your viewpoint, Lindsay Posner’s competent new production lives either up or down to your expectations. What it won’t do is make converts in either direction.This ferocious comedy which made Mike Leigh’s name is short on plot but big on situation Read more ...
aleks.sierz
A new play by Mike Leigh is always an event. So there was a palpable excitement in the air at the Cottesloe Theatre (the smallest and most intimate of the three National Theatre auditoria) when his latest opened last night. With a cast that includes Lesley Manville, a regular collaborator who was also in his 2010 film Another Year, the expectation was that this would be an instant classic.Leigh doesn’t so much disappoint expectations as subvert them. Radically. At first, the main pleasure is one of recognition. Oh yes, you think, I know where we are: it’s 1957 and we are in a nice commuter Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There is somewhere called Leighland, where people may be ineffably sad or existentially cheerful, old or young, live in a high rise or a semi. But they are all recognisably inhabitants of the world famously conjured up over a long period of clandestine development in the now time-honoured fashion. Nothing and everything changes in the work of Mike Leigh (b 1943). However, consumers of his vast oeuvre stretching back to the 1960s will this year have had the chance to do something extremely rare: see a pair of works by Leigh in the theatre.Ecstasy opened at Hampstead Theatre in 1979 and Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Film-maker and playwright Mike Leigh simply doesn’t do revivals. His method of working - which involves a group of actors improvising characters and situations until a story emerges - runs contrary to any notion of returning to a play after its premiere. So it is quite astonishing to report that, for the first time, Leigh has revisited one of his own plays, Ecstasy, which he originally put on at the Hampstead Theatre in September 1979, and which is now back at the same venue. But, given that the world has changed so much in the past 30 years, is it any more than a period piece?The set - Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Another of Mike Leigh’s finely nuanced ensemble pieces features some of his repertory players - including Jim Broadbent, Lesley Manville and Ruth Sheen - who have developed their roles and dialogue in collaboration with the director. Those who, like me, find Leigh’s representations of working-class people in his films rather annoying will have no such qualms here as he is on home territory with a story about middle-class lives, for which he has deservedly been nominated at the upcoming Oscars for best original screenplay.Another Year is about a group of family and friends and spans four Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Mike Leigh's Another Year traverses the four seasons beginning with spring, and yet the mood is autumnal throughout. People don't sunbathe or picnic or build bonfires or for the most part respond in any particular way to the passage of time. Instead, they nurse cups of tea, share (if they're lucky) in a cuddle, and bear out in varying ways the truth of a remark that gets voiced well into the film. "Life's not always kind, is it?" asks Gerri (Ruth Sheen), a gently spoken medical counsellor who knows that no reply is needed; the answer is on full, melancholic view all around her.At first, you Read more ...