I watched it after having seen the glowing reviews and references to mike Leigh's work, well all I saw was a cartoon. A political cheap shot that relies on such simplistic and exaggerated caricatures really only cheapens any point he is trying to make. The car salesman and his social-climbing wife are obnoxious to the point of absurdity, the posh folks next door are the same, all ice-cold and uncaring, basically he isn't doing so much social commentary as beating his point to death with such a ham-fisted delivery that he destroys his own credibility. Long shots of the elderly woman and her plight in this cartoon just come off as out of place in this film, on one hand it is pretending to explore real issues like aging and socialist ideas in thatchers Britain, but surrounded by the cartoonish back ground it just comes off as very pointless. You got where he was going in the first 25% of the film, and it doesn't really add anything from that point on, it just continues beating the dead horse, nothing much of real value is explored after that. Other reviews mention it explores dynamics of family and siblings and aging, but really it only touches on these in the most shallow way possible between the absurd moments of cartoonish acting. It is the kind of film you'd expect from a political hack, not a philosopher.

A seemingly quaint period piece that articulates eternal issues. All the characters are so real I wondered if they were based on people I know, as I lived near to kings cross at that time. I now realise these characters are modern archetypes. Did mike Leigh invent the archetypes? The film making itself is so understated that I wondered if I was watching reality TV! The device of the opening character , to lead us into the lives of these characters is a stroke of genius! I always approach Leighs films thinking 'worthy but boring', but time and again he has me crying and laughing and everything in-between. This film will only get better with time.

To watch a movie like this again - I saw it on release and now it's a freebie with a Broadsheet - is to wonder aloud why Mike Leigh, who proves here that he CAN write an Original screenplay, felt compelled to rip off Chabrol's Une Affaire des femmes in Vera Drake. Like much, if not all of Leigh's output this is an ensemble piece and if the labels on each character are writ in Bold Face - Socialist brother, Capitalist sister, Yuppie couple etc - that's just a minor flaw in Leigh's make up, he is, after all, firmly entrenched in the Ken Loach anti-Capitalist camp but unlike Loach he does remember to entertain the audience and not just preach at them. This movie revolves around a fragmented family; brother Cyril is so steeped in Socialism that he is allowed to make schoolboyish statements like 'the day they machine gun the Royal Family is the day I'll wear a tie', whilst sister Valerie is heavily into conspicuous consumption and their old mum is slowly descending into a twilight world of short-term memory loss and confusion. Mum still lives alone in the house she's presumably occupied all her married life and where the brother and sister have been raised but the once run-down neighborhood is going up-market so the yuppie couple next door comprise a third couple. This is primarily a vehicle for an ensemble cast and each actor takes his own particular ball and runs with it whilst the director juggles those same balls. It was perhaps a mistake to let Heather Tobias play not only Abigail from Abigail's Party but play it in the style of Leigh's ex-wife Alison Steadman who created the role of Abigail but against that there will be younger viewers who never saw Abigail's Party. The sequences involving Jason Watkins peter out not quite half way through which raises the question of what they were doing there in the first place. The biggest negative is that the film is primarily a study of 'North London' types (Breaking And Entering uses the same locale)and other North Londoners will recognise and possibly sneer at themselves and their friends/neighbors but it's difficult to know what they'd make of it in Leigh's native Salford. If you like fine acting you came to the right place but if you like taut, well-made screenplays chances are you'll be disappointed.

The life and times of an extended family in 1980's London.Director Mike Leigh is probably the closest the UK has to Woody Allen: and like Allen his films go from absolute classics to barely watchable. Here he is about as good as he ever will be - indeed there are scenes from this movie that are, in there own way, as profound and original as anything that has been put down on film.Who else would let the camera linger on the face of an old woman just at the point of losing her sanity? Or dare to present a couple going nowhere as the centrepiece of a feature film? Or even present "success stories" (a yuppie couple) as rank and selfish? Here lower-middle-and-upper crusts are clowns, it is only a matter of levels and angles.Indeed, Leigh never gives us anything to cling to. Nor does he want to present hope that things will change for the better. Take the central couple Shirley and Cyril (Philip Davies and Ruth Sheen). Why are they living like squatters in their own tiny flat? Why can they not buy a proper bed (they sleep on the floor) or look for somewhere better - after all they both work? Apart from the question of a child (she wants - he doesn't) they both seem happy to live in squalor. In Shirley we at least have someone who cares for other people.The old lady - through which the story is told - is on her last legs as regards living an independent life. The house she lives in has become neglected and the area she lives in no longer contain her type of people. Her neurotic daughter is so wrapped up in her own suburban life that she does seem to realise her mother is at the point of collapse. The scene where she holds a birthday party for her aged mother is agony - not for her confused mother - but for us the viewer.Some of the performances are a little of the top (Leigh's films let actors improvise) and I could have lived without so much of the melancholy music track that rubs everything in. But this is the only film since One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest that lets humour and tragedy sit side by side without blinking.Director Leigh gets under your skin and takes you places we haven't been on film before - but I am not sure they are places I would want to go on a regular basis. He is a one-off, but I am secretly glad about that.