Films with: Leigh, Mike

Abigail's party

""Abigail's Party" features Beverly, a bitingly funny hostess of a dainty evening party at which her husband has the ultimate bad taste of having a heart attack on her new living room carpet. Unable to decide which is more important, her dying husband or her new, very expensive carpet, Abigail must must come to terms with where her true priorities lay. One of Mike Leigh's greatest works, "Abigail's Party" reaches a moment where the unbearable and the hopeless fuse to create an explosion of incredible humor and tremendous insight into the state of human affairs." --container.

DVD 7645

All or nothing

In a crowded South London apartment building, Penny, a working mom, struggles to keep her wayward daughter, her lazy son and her disillustioned partner on the right path.

DVD 2397

Another year

A married couple who have managed to remain blissfully happy into their autumn years are surrounded over the course of the four seasons of one average year by friends, colleagues, and family who all seem to suffer some degree of unhappiness.

DVD 8153

Bleak moments

Centers around a shy but intelligent middle-class girl, Sylvia, who is barely surviving suburban loneliness while looking after her mentally retarded sister Hilda.

DVD 651

Career girls

"Two unlikely college roommates become close friends amidst a dizying whirl of books, booze and boyfriends. Reunited six years after graduation, Annie and Hannah take a funny, poignant look at the girls they were and the women they have become"--Container.

DVD 4555

Grown ups

"Dick and Mandy, a young working class couple move into a council house in Cantebury, and find Mr. Butcher, one of their former teachers, living next door. Mandy's unmarried sister, Gloria, is constantly dropping in, and will not take any hints that the couple would prefer to be left alone, until her presence finally goads them to action. The entire film come to a head when both couples are found wrestling in the hall while trying to oust the poor sister from the Mr. Butcher's bathroom."--Container.

DVD 7647

Happy-go-lucky

Poppy is a life-loving and irrepressibly cheerful primary school teacher. She is thirty years old, single, and infinitely optimistic and accepting. She lives with her best friend and flatmate Zoe in London. She is tested by a repressed driving instructor with anger problems, and, in turn, she decides to test him. She has exciting flamenco lessons, an encounter with a homeless man, an argument with her pregnant sister, and a love-affair with the social worker guiding one of her students.

DVD 6414

Hard labour

Focuses on the grinding, daily abuse a poor, elderly woman suffers at the hands of her husband, her children and her employer.

DVD 712

Här har du ditt liv Here is your life /

This mesmerizing debut by the great Swedish director Jan Troell (The Emigrants, The New Land) is an epic bildungsroman and a multilayered representation of early twentieth-century Sweden. Based on a series of semi-autobiographical novels by Nobel Prize winner Eyvind Johnson, the film follows a working-class boy's development, from naive teenager to intellectually curious young adult, from logger to movie projectionist to politically engaged man of the people--all set against the backdrop of a slowly industrializing rural landscape. With its mix of modernist visual ingenuity and elegantly structured storytelling, this enchanting film--presented here in its original nearly three-hour cut--is a reminder that Troell is one of European cinema's greatest and most sensitive illuminators of the human condition.

DVD 13006

High hopes

Cyril and Shirley are a young, working-class couple who, in their struggle to make ends meet, have become absorbed in socialism. Cyril's sister Valerie and her husband aspire to a more privileged class. The only glue holding the siblings together is their withdrawn and wistful old mother.

DVD 7515

Mr. Turner

Explores the last quarter century of the great if eccentric British painter J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851). Profoundly affected by the death of his father, loved by a housekeeper he takes for granted and occasionally exploits sexually, he forms a close relationship with a seaside landlady with whom he eventually lives incognito in Chelsea, where he dies.

DVD 10995

Naked

A charming, eloquent, and vicious drifter on the lam in London rejects those who would care for him and hurls himself into a nocturnal odyssey through the city, colliding with a succession of desperate and dispossessed people and scorching everyone in his path.

DVD 6224

Nuts in May

Hilarious and appalling things happen to Keith and Candice-Marie, a pair of terrifically self-satisfied, middle-class vegetarians still high on love-philosophy of the 1960's, when they go on a camping trip in Dorset.

DVD 7644

Secrets & lies

Hortense, an adopted Black woman in London, seeks out her natural birth mother only to discover the woman is white. Equally shocked to learn the daughter she gave up for adoption is Black, Cynthia insists it's a mistake. But she soon realizes it's true. When Cynthia brings her newfound daughter home to meet her family-from-hell, all the secrets and lies, the deceptions and animosities come pouring out.

DVD 4533

Topsy-Turvy

Tensions abound and the music swells in the story about the famous musical team of Gilbert and Sullivan. The two men who were extremely different in size and stature were even more different in temperament and style. Yet, they still managed to create memorable theater. This is the story of the making of one of their most famous collaborations, The Mikado.

DVD 568

Vera Drake

Vera Drake tells of a woman in 1950s England who is devoted to caring for her family, but secretly aids women who want to terminate unwanted pregnancies. When the authorities find her out, Vera's world and family life rapidly unravel.

DVD 3493

Who's who

Story about workers in a London brokerage firm, and their struggles with class and society. Their experiences prove, with humor, that the higher one rises on the social scale the more likely one is to be greedy and petty.

DVD 7646