Movies: Mike Leigh

A look at the production of Play for Today: Abigail's Party (1977)....

Slice-of-life look at class divisions among employees of a brokerage house. Alan, with his portrait of the Queen and love of the peerage; his wife April, who raises cats; youthful and pretentious friends Nigel, Giles, and Anthony, who gather for a wi...

Writer and Director Mike Leigh discusses the techniques used to create his plays....

Three postal workers and their dysfunctional families interact over cups of tea and Sunday dinner....

A quiet and put-upon house cleaner breaks her silence....

In a revealing documentary, Mike Leigh, director of Secrets & Lies, Vera Drake and Abigail's Party among many others, talks to Alan Yentob about a unique body of work and a lifelong struggle to make films on his own terms. On day one of a Mike Le...

Penny works at a supermarket and Phil is a gentle taxi-driver. Penny’s love for Phil has run dry and they lead joyless lives with their two children, Rachel, a cleaner, and Rory, who is unemployed and aggressive....

Eccentric British painter J.M.W. Turner lives his last 25 years with gusto and secretly becomes involved with a seaside landlady, while his faithful housekeeper bears an unrequited love for him....

A working-class family in London's East End is struggling to stay afloat during the recession under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's premiership. Only the mother Mavis is working; father Frank and the couple's two sons Colin, a timid, chronically s...

A look at a few chapters in the life of Poppy, a cheery, colorful, North London schoolteacher whose optimism tends to exasperate those around her....

A young college student in London moves into a flat and becomes best friends with a flatmate; the former moves into her own flat 4 years later but 6 years after their parting, the former returns to London to pay the latter a visit....

Documentary about Humphrey Jennings, an English documentary filmmaker from the 1930s to 1950....

Gary attempts to buy a second-hand car. What should be a straightforward task is turned into something of a quest by various people, including dodgy East End car dealer Perry, Perry's taxi-driver dad, a garage owner called Derek, Perry's wife Debbie...

A man on crutches bumps into an old acquaintance who relentlessly bombards him with small talk....

A short comedy by Mike Leigh about the romance between a young woman and a man who communicates only through jokes and humor......

Based on David Stuart Leslie's novel Two Left Feet is a story about Alan Crabbe (Michael Crawford a callow youth desperate for a date with any girl who can offer him the experience he lacks. Every time Alan tries a manful stride into the jungle of se...

Theatrical packaging of three comic shorts: Dean Parisot & Steven Wright's comedy "The Appointments of Dennis Jennings" (1988), Michael Moore's documentary "Pets or Meat" (1992), and Mike Leigh & Jim Broadbent's satirical mockumentary "A Sense of His...

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A window cleaner fancies a sausage roll, but all is not well in the sausage roll factory....

In this second installment of his exploration of creativity, Hermann Vaske looks for factors that inhibit it. He asks artists, activists, and thinkers about things that kill their creativity....