ALL OR NOTHING

Country: UK
Director: Mike Leigh
Lead Actors : Timothy Spall, Lesley Manville, Alison Garland, James Corden, Ruth Sheen, Marion Bailey
Running time: 128 min.
Rating: 14A (Coarse and sexual language, nudity)

"Leigh’s uncanny ability to mine emotional truth packs the usual punch. You’ll find yourself praying for this family to win the lottery. The cast is uniformly excellent.” - Megan Turner, NY Post

The masterful Mike Leigh follows the much admired TOPSY-TURVY and SECRETS & LIES with a compassionate little masterpiece, ALL OR NOTHING, which appreared at both Cannes and Toronto film festivals.

ALL OR NOTHING is set in a drab housing complex in South London, where a group of neighbours – young and middle-aged, married and single – fight, bicker, loaf about and generally fail to express themselves. At the centre of the film are the Bassetts: Phil, a downtrodden taxi driver (Timothy Spall, TOPSY-TURVY), his common-law wife Penny (Lesley Manville, SECRETS & LIES), who works as a supermarket cashier, and their two in-their-20’s overweight kids, nursing home attendent Rachel (Alison Garland) who drifts wordlessly in the background and layabout Rory (James Corden) who’s loud, unemployed and looking for a good fight. Circling around this harried family is an crew of motley characters: loutish boyfriends, desperately unhappy daughters, scheming friends, alcoholic husbands and brassy adolescents, each with something missing from their lives and looking for respite.

Ripping into the hyposcrisies and deficiencies of marriage and relationships with a wicked sense of humour and irony, Leigh’s detailed portrait of the British working class takes a turn when family tragedy hits, the floodgates open and a ray of hope is discovered. It is this ability and desire to find solace, hope and perhaps even a hint of salvation amid the rubble of contemporary life, that makes ALL OR NOTHING one of Mike Leigh’s finest and most notable films.

  • Won London Critics Circle Awards for Best British Actress and Best British Film of the Year
  • Nominated for 2 European Film Awards for Best Actor and Best Director

"British writer-director Mike Leigh, the man who's given us such films as Secrets And Lies and Topsy-Turvy, has crafted a bleak, at times grimly humorous, examination of lower-class life that packs a powerful emotional wallop in its unflinching climax." - Toronto Sun

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