A Guide to the Films of Mike Leigh, From Tragic to Comic

Mike Leigh is one of the most prolific living filmmakers, an acolyte of the human condition. With a body of work that ranges from micro-dramas to period-set opulence, Leigh makes films that never lack in acute observational detail. After years of struggling to find funding, his latest, Hard Truths, arrives to remind us that no one creates movies that enmesh tragedy and comedy quite as powerfully as he does. So obviously, now is the time to look back at his entire career.

But Leigh’s films don’t lend themselves to simple worst-to-best rankings. For starters, they’re all pretty great. Even his fellow prolific contemporaries don’t have a bar so high — sorry, Ridley Scott. And second, with all of his works exploring the human experience in various settings, there maybe isn’t the quintessential Mike Leigh film. Any qualitative list says more about the listmakers than the work therein, and this would be especially true for Leigh. Ask ten Leigh heads their favorite of his films and you will get ten different answers, which is a testament to how the range of his work can connect differently to different people.

The average moviegoer probably knows plenty of Leigh’s stable of regulars — Jim Broadbent, Lesley Manville, Timothy Spall, and Imelda Staunton, to name a few — from their bigger films, but not the man who has brought these performers together in myriad roles and combinations across 50 years. Despite his plentiful filmography, Leigh’s films still often fall under the radar, and with so many years of work, deciding where to begin can be a puzzle. Should you go in order of release? Start with the ones that got Oscar nominations? But Leigh’s work defies a best-worst or new-old spectrum with a kind of robust emotional diversity. What if you could program your way through his filmography by tone?

So instead, this ranking charts his films as Leigh views life itself: as a range from pure tragedy to pure comedy, and everything in between. This isn’t as easy to configure as it sounds — Leigh can find levity and peace in even the most dire working-class circumstances, and alternately, tragedy can (and often does) strike in his funniest setups. This is true for both his contemporary films and his period pieces, which helps the latter transcend costume-drama stereotypes. The substance of any Mike Leigh film is how these elements interact in his deeply identifiable characters and the situations they find themselves in. The stuff of life, love!

Any of Leigh’s films are exhaustive in human and social detail, so naturally this list should be exhaustive as well — we’ve included all of his made-for-TV films. This is not to incite further silly debate about what constitutes as cinema or television (and Mike would certainly find such discourse dumb) but to emphasize that his beginnings with the BBC resulted in some pretty great work (readily available Stateside thanks to the Criterion Channel). While there’s no question that these films are less aesthetically polished than his later refined theatrical works like Mr. Turner, they serve as a foundation for Leigh’s signature tone and themes that it’s impossible to deny.

Here is where the films of Mike Leigh, a master of human tragedy and everyday comedy, land on a scale of tragic-comic circumstances.

TRAGIC

Hard Labour (1973)

It takes nearly the whole length of Leigh’s Hard Labour for Mrs. Thornley, a put-upon cleaner in Manchester, to say more than just a few words aloud. She’s gone to confession for the first time in two weeks, the weight of the world around her closing in. She’s repulsed by her husband Jim (Clifford Kershaw) whose grabby hands demand her body and attention, often without her consent. Her children Ann (Polly Hemingway) and Edward (Bernard Hill in his first on-screen performance) don’t want much to do with her. Her boss Mrs. Stone (Vanessa Harris) snaps and gossips. But for all that those around her behave poorly, it’s Mrs. Thornley who feels bad. She carries the weight of these people’s sins on her, and when she takes these stories to confession, her priest is, well, bored. He’s impatient, rushing her along, as she barely ekes out more than a couple of sentences. Cleansing her soul won’t fix anything in her life. Mrs. Thornley’s suffering weighs heavy; salvation can’t lift her burdens.

Naked (1993)

Set in the period between Thatcher’s resignation and the coming millennium, Leigh had apocalypse on his mind when crafting Naked, the story of an unwell would-be intellectual named Johnny, played miraculously by David Thewlis.  As Johnny returns to his former lover Louise (Lesley Sharp) in London, we see the existential chaos that ensues in and around her flat, including an almost cyclical barrage of mental and sexual degradations. Johnny is all hollowed-out contradictions, swinging between victim and perpetrator, messiah and blowhard, a terrifying and devastatingly human product of his time. In a haze of chiaroscuro images, the film envisions post-Thatcher society as a maze of sociological, ideological, and financial dead-ends. What continues to make it a disquieting watch is its doomsday timeliness: it was made in reaction to a time, yet feels prescient of our own. The final shot of the film — Thewlis shambling down the street and struggling to keep pace with the camera as it pulls away from him — is a stark final political note from Leigh and a stylistic coup from his long-time collaborator, the recently departed cinematographer Dick Pope.

Bleak Moments (1971)

For a film like Bleak Moments, the title says it all. Leigh’s directorial debut — adapted from his stage play of the same name — tells the story of Sylvia (Anne Raitt), a young secretary living with her sister Hilda (Sarah Stevenson) who is disabled and requires involved care. Sylvia is desperate to get out of her home and meet people, but she is awkward and shy. She’s burdened by her sister, but all they have is each other. People flit in and out of her life — she has a brash but friendly coworker, a few suitors — but Sylvia is often too fearful to step away from the life she’s dug herself into. Leigh’s film is so depressing as to border on legitimate discomfort; the director has never made anything objectively “cringy,” but there are a number of scenes in Bleak Moments that make you want to crawl out of your own skin. Sylvia’s suffering is the audience’s suffering, and Leigh wants us to know just how profound her loneliness is.

Vera Drake (2004)

Leigh’s eponymous film about a 1950s abortionist in London has a somewhat unexpectedly gentler vibe than a lot of the director’s more outright tragic works. It helps, of course, that the titular Vera Drake (Imelda Staunton) has a rather content working-class life; she’s in a loving marriage, she has kind-hearted children, and the women for whom she provides abortions are grateful for her support and kindness during their times of need. Establishing Drake’s unremarkable but deeply fulfilling life lets Leigh show how routine and casual the healthcare she provides can be, as well as how much more cruel it feels when her world all comes crashing down. From the second the police knock on the Drake family home (on Christmas day, no less!), Vera Drake descends into a world of unrelenting pain as the rug is pulled out from under everything Vera holds dear. Staunton’s teary clarity doubles as courage as she weathers a storm of injustice.

Peterloo (2018)

Both one of his most ambitious and most political films, Peterloo was unfairly pushed aside upon release. Here Leigh recounts the period after the Battle of Waterloo when the people of Manchester organized in the pursuit of parliamentary representation. The eponymous massacre, a real-life event where hundreds of protestors were injured along with 18 deaths, serves as the film’s sobering climax. But the meat of the film lies in the buildup, with Leigh methodically taking us through the organizational effort it takes to build a political movement and how political activation happens within everyday people. Rory Kinear is the closest thing the film has to a protagonist as Henry Hunt, a haughty activist with poor social skills. However, Leigh is more interested in the Manchester locals who are nameless to history, captively observing their growing political awareness before catastrophe strikes. Peterloo is a process film, yet nowhere near as dry as that sounds. Given the reality of history and how contemporary political climate reverberates into the film itself, you can imagine it’s far from Leigh’s lightest fare.

All or Nothing (2002)

In 1982, Leigh explored the relationship of three working class families in London in his BBC Play for Today film Home Sweet Home. Twenty years later, he returned to this cinematic structure in All or Nothing, a movie that is also about three working class families all living in a dreary apartment complex. At the center of the story are Phil (Timothy Spall) and Penny (Lesley Manville), a weary, unmarried couple burdened by their lack of love for one another and their crumbling household. While daughter Rachel (Alison Garland) holds a steady cleaning job, son Rory (James Corden) sits around day after day, getting up only to pick fights with other people in the estate. While there are notable and beautiful bright spots to All or Nothing (most of which go to infallible Leigh regular Ruth Sheen), the film really doubles down on the ambient misery of these people’s lives. The vague depression that infuses the film undercuts the energy of the movie, the whole viewing experience akin to popping a melatonin at the wrong time of day and feeling bad about it. Only in the last fifteen minutes of the movie does the light emerge from behind the clouds — things aren’t necessarily better, but maybe they’re a little different.

TRAGIC-COMIC

Hard Truths (2024)

Leigh’s latest is a return to contemporary setting. It stars Secrets & Lies’ Jean-Baptiste as Pansy, a woman paralyzed by her own anger and fear of the outside world. In the hardened compassion that is Leigh’s signature, we witness Pansy’s increasingly strained relationship with her family, including the already grossly underrated Michele Austin and David Webber. And then there’s her all-out verbal barrage on any stranger or customer service individual in sight. Pansy’s resentments are casual but bone-deep, and her fury unleashes some of the punchiest jokes in Leigh’s repertoire — truly, what does a baby have pockets for?? But her monologuing can only be amusing for so long, and when Hard Truths pivots on Jean-Baptiste’s seismic performance, we begin to understand the depths of Pansy’s pain and isolation. The film is also a return to form for Leigh as an incisive purveyor of How We Live Now: as much as Pansy’s tirades are relatably hilarious in their everyday pettiness, her consuming anger reflects a uniquely post-COVID depression and reckoning. Perhaps you could find some room for optimism in the film’s open ending, or you might as easily see an outcome as bleak as anything Leigh has ever composed.

The Kiss of Death (1977)

Leave it to Leigh to begin a romcom (or at least his closest approximation to one) with a funeral. This BBC Play for Today film follows the shy and awkward Trevor as he mumbles through a courtship with chatty, dull gum-smacker Linda. Leigh’s dry humor shrouds their strained flirtation with Linda all but forcing Trevor’s hand to make the courtship happen;Their double date friends Ronnie and Sandra are as blandly perfunctory a pairing. Though dating is presented as both humorously tedious and despairingly futile, the film features perhaps the most crushing image of Leigh’s entire career as its centerpiece: a baby that has died of SIDS. The Kiss of Death cringes knowingly at Trevor’s romantic life while trying to get to the bottom of Trevor’s resignation to how little life has in store, though Trevor isn’t as hopeless a young person as Leigh has presented before. Leigh has admitted that Trevor contains some autobiographical pieces of himself, which makes you wonder if Leigh intentionally defined himself and his point of view as an artist through Trevor’s job. Trevor is an undertaker.

Home Sweet Home (1982)

On one hand, you’ve got a young Timothy Spall farting over Frank Sinatra, and on the other hand, Leigh’s Play for Today film Home Sweet Home might be one of the director’s most emotionally frustrating works. The movie focuses on the domestic lives of three male postal workers, all of whom marinate in unhappiness of their own making. Leigh’s films often explore the wide spectrum of the parent-child relationship, from the buddy-buddy father-son camaraderie in Mr. Turner to the tumultuous mother-daughter duo in Secrets & Lies; in Home Sweet Home Leigh presents the most bummer father-daughter pair in Stan (Eric Richard) and Tina (Lorraine Brunning). Stan’s wife left when Tina was only six years old, leaving him responsible for his young daughter. But as Tina’s aged, Stan’s only become less and less interested in caring for her. Their fraught, almost-silent relationship demands a catharsis Leigh is unwilling to give us. These two gave up on each other a long time ago.

Meantime (1983)

Set in the generational depression that came with Thatcher, Meantime follows young Eastender brothers Colin and Mark (a young Tim Roth and Phil Daniels). Both are unemployed with little opportunity in sight, pitted against one another in a constantly bickering home, and listless to it all. Meantime is a classic example of Leigh’s ability to bring humor to a darker milieu through idiosyncratic characterization or, simply, assembling a gang of goofy guys. Even in their circumstances, Leigh’s characters speak in a blunt sarcasm that isn’t just funny, but underlines the cold, unfeeling environment that they can’t escape. The film gave Gary Oldman his first breakthrough as the unpredictable skinhead Coxy, who proves to have an influence over the impressionable Colin. We’re left with a bleak outlook for what’s to come of Colin, but more importantly, a conflicting sense for Mark — he claims he’s leaving and going “anywhere,” but we suspect he’s going nowhere.

Secrets & Lies (1996)

Secrets & Lies won Leigh the Palme d’Or, his first Oscar nominations, and a global platform for this story of a family’s, well, secrets and lies. The driving force of that family narrative is the reunion between Hortense (Jean-Baptiste) and the mother that gave her up for adoption, emotional mess Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn). Their reunion plays out in real time and is one of Leigh’s most unforgettable scenes, with Blethyn’s unbridled, volcanic emotions matched harmoniously by Jean-Baptiste’s conflicted but unshaken compulsion to stay. The film’s raw emotion is wholly consuming but it amounts to something cathartic rather than despairing. Ultimately, Secrets & Lies concludes with a well-earned sense of reconciliation and is possibly Leigh’s most optimistic work. If you’re going to have a movie’s title said by a character in a film, it should always be delivered by a dejected Timothy Spall after an explosive monologue.

MOOD STABILIZER

Four Days in July (1984)

Considering Leigh’s more punishing films about British politics, it’s surprising that this Northern Ireland-set film is so calm when taking on two of life’s most stressful situations: political unrest and childbirth. The final film Leigh made for the BBC, Four Days in July follows two Irish couples across the religious divide, with both awaiting the arrival of their first born. Rather than looking at examining the differences between the Catholics and the Protestants, Leigh centers the story on the overarching similarities in their lives. It’s probably the most chill film to ever tackle the Troubles. You expect a little more depth and complexity from Leigh’s typically uncompromising political vantage, but it’s also hard to deny the valuable effect of the gentility he applies to this fraught subject. It isn’t simplistically uplifting either;Leigh concludes with the idea that new life brings just as much potential for positive change as darkness — a nurse says as she gazes at one of the newborns, “this could be another wee Hitler.”

High Hopes (1988)

It’s no surprise that Leigh’s most romantic film is possibly one of his most even-keeled, an idyllic mix of just enough tragedy and comedy to feel, well, like life. High Hopes tells the story of Cyril (Phil Davis) and Shirley (Ruth Sheen), a socialist couple in their mid-30s trying to plan for the future during the worst years of Margaret Thatcher’s government. What they lack in means, however, they make up for in love. This is a funny, bright couple — the type of people you’d love to chat with over a game of pool or a couple of beers. The bulk of the comedy in the film stems from yet another one of Leigh’s ridiculous portrayals of the upper class: the posh couple who live next to Cyril’s mother, the hilariously named “Laetitia and Rupert Boothe-Brain,” give loud representation to the types of people who ruin a neighborhood overnight. Though Cyril and Shirley’s lows are low, as they contend with Cyril’s preening middle-class sister Valerie and the swift gentrification of their mother’s neighborhood, their highs are transcendent. A plaintive scene in which Cyril and Shirley visit Marx’s grave in Highgate Cemetery indulges some of Leigh’s most pessimistic and hopeful visions of young urban life.

Another Year (2010)

Describing Another Year makes the film sound so broad and flowery as to be trivial, and it is anything but. This blindsidingly humane film follows a year in the life of older couple Tom and Gerri (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen) and their social circle — particularly their boozy, incompetent friend Mary (Lesley Manville). Over four elliptical seasons, Tom and Gerri experience joy, death, and all the stuff in between. As Mary bursts into every moment like a solipsistic tornado, it’s easy to come away from Another Year having given her much of your attention, especially given the raw nerve immediacy of Manville’s performance. Yet on rewatch (or, maybe more specifically, as you age with the film), Tom and Gerri begin to feel less and less like passive protagonists, not merely accepting what happens to them but facing it head on. This crucial difference is what Leigh is subtly getting at with Another Year, a film reflecting on what it actually means to live a life, with head and heart and with both feet on the ground. Folks who see themselves in Mary’s desperation might view the film in more despairing terms, but this is perhaps Leigh’s most life-goes-on effort.

Mr. Turner (2014)

Timothy Spall’s grumbling, mumbling take on English painter J.M.W. Turner is one of Leigh’s funniest characters to grace the screen. Not unlike the director’s Gilbert and Sullivan anti-biopic biopic, Mr. Turner focuses more on Turner’s process than Turner’s life — how a man who lived modestly and behaved boorishly came to produce works of such undeniable beauty. On a scene to scene level, Mr. Turner is packed full of delightful dialogue and wonderful scenes of 19th century painters bickering and arguing, though the undercurrent of the film is one of unstoppable modernity. Turner was most famous for his paintings of the sea and of ships, but as he ages, so too does the world give way to inventions like steamboats and photographs. His way of life becomes near-obsolete before his very eyes, but that doesn’t mean he still can’t find beauty amidst all the ugliness.

COMIC-TRAGIC

Career Girls (1997)

In Career Girls, Katrin Cartlidge and Linda Steadman star as Hannah and Annie, two former college roommates reunited for a few days. Flashing back to their younger selves where Annie was an anxious wreck with Hannah cool and self-assured, the film has all the delights of a lighthearted story of friendship between polar opposites and smartly tracks how they change over time. Though the flashbacks give the film a more formulaic structure, it avoids the cliches of friendship films and sitcoms – the closest this thing gets to a laugh track is Andy Serkis as a pervert inappropriately at ease in a bathrobe. The typical, bittersweet Leighian perspective is revealed that in order to move forward – in friendship, into adulthood – some things have to get left behind, represented by their troubled, forgotten friend Ricky (Mark Benton).

Grown-Ups (1980)

No, not that Grown-Ups. Leigh’s BBC comedy is one of the director’s most formative works. What Grown-Ups lacks in quality, it more than makes up for in laying the groundwork for Leigh’s rich character development and penchant for chaotic comedy. Watching his 1980 made-for-BBC film is to see the foundations of what would later become Secrets & Lies or High Hopes or Happy-Go-Lucky. In Grown-Ups, Leigh regulars Phil Davis and Lesley Manville play Dick and Mandy, a mopey young married couple who try and fail to make adult lives for themselves in their new house. Their relative peace and quiet is routinely interrupted by Gloria, Mandy’s sister, played with frazzled mania by the wonderful Brenda Blethyn. The third act of the film devolves into a screaming argument set across two houses and two yards, all the characters we’ve grown to love and loathe trading barb after insult. As pathetic and pitiable as Gloria is, Blethyn runs away with the whole movie.

Life is Sweet (1990)

What is it that Tolstoy says about unhappy families — each unhappy in its own way? Such is the fate of Andy (Jim Broadbent) and Wendy (Alison Steadman) and their stay-at-home adult daughters Nicola (Jane Horrocks) and Natalie (Claire Skinner). Andy, Wendy, and Natalie are content to get by, no matter what comes their way, but Nicola feels everything much more intensely. She’s depressed and struggling with an eating disorder, tolerating a bad boyfriend (David Thewlis) and unemployment by screeching around the house and insulting everyone she meets. Her family’s persistent optimism offends her on every level, but she’s too dismayed at the world around her to take part in it. Though Nicola’s pain is straight, the rest of Life is Sweet swings broad and brash. Leigh goes for the gags in this one, from Broadbent’s workplace pratfall to friend of the family Aubrey’s (Timothy Spall) disgusting new restaurant. It’d all be so funny, if only Nicola would share in the laughs once in a while.

Abigail’s Party (1977)

Leigh positions middle class small talk as a series of casual humiliations in Abigail’s Party, a comedy of manners set at a cocktail party between three neighboring households. Beverley hosts while her workaholic husband Laurence dips in and out, and the guests are new residents Angela and Tony and divorcée Sue (whose titular, unseen teenage daughter hosts a neighboring party). Leigh considers this a creative disappointment: it originated as a successful play and was captured for the BBC in quick turnaround without as much conception for the filmmaking as he would have liked. Chalk it up to too much self-criticism, because Abigail’s Party is nevertheless a barnburner of character-based cringe comedy and the most popular of his films for television for good reason. Alison Steadman’s flirty, angry performance as Beverley is a highlight, transforming “okay” into the funniest word in the English language and then the most aggravating and then back again with brute force. The result is not unlike Leigh’s version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? but with more sardonic flair. When tragedy ultimately strikes, paralysis is the commonality between each character and the outlook for intermarried social warfare is decidedly grim.

Happy-Go-Lucky (2008)

In Happy-Go-Lucky, Sally Hawkins plays Poppy, the world’s most cheerful, generous elementary school teacher, a chirpy songbird in human form. Though Hawkins is plenty comedic in the film, much of the comedy in Leigh’s film comes from the ways in which the world interacts with Poppy. For all her positivity and kindness, Happy-Go-Lucky is still set in reality. There’s discord and violence — at Poppy’s school, out in London, even during her driving lessons with the ornery, proto-men’s rights advocate Scott (Eddie Marsan). While their back and forths have all the classic pitter-patter of conventional comedy, the darkness that permeates Scott’s worldview threatens, at times, to overhaul Leigh’s film, or at the very least, to remind Poppy that personal happiness is less contagious than she may believe. There is a collective sadness that runs through Happy-Go-Lucky, though Poppy fights against the current with a smile and laugh all the same.

COMIC

Who’s Who (1979)

So earlier, when we said it wouldn’t be simple to list Leigh in terms of best and worst? Well, that’s only half true. Look, it is always depressing when one of the greats turns in their weakest work, particularly when it lacks the definitive traits of what makes their work special. Who’s Who is precisely that, with working class champion Leigh instead taking a rare focus on the upper class. We follow Royals devotee Alan and his brokerage firm coworkers, whose pretensions accelerate towards farce over a dinner party (Mike loves a dinner party). It’s a satire of self-satisfied Thatcherites, like Leigh’s version of Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan but reaching for only the obvious observations about upper class frivolousness. There isn’t much that Leigh has to say about these people other than how much they suck, and it might have been more damning if Leigh granted them his typical curiosity rather than such mercilessness. But with characterizations more quirky than recognizable, Who’s Who still lands the joke, even if it is just 75 minutes of unsparing and airless class commentary.

Topsy-Turvy (1999)

Not quite a musical and not quite a standard fare biopic, Leigh’s three-hour Gilbert and Sullivan film is one of the most rollicking good times and best films in the director’s career. Rather than diving into the composers’ full career, Leigh focuses instead on the career slump that led Gilbert (played with hilarious ire by Jim Broadbent) and Sullivan (played with wry charisma by Allan Corduner) to write The Mikado — the composers’ “authentic” take on Japanese culture. In order to get The Mikado off the ground, the two composers need to get everyone on board: the old actors, the new boys, the producers, the choreographer, the costume designer, the stagehands, the orchestra… to say nothing of their wives and mistresses back home. The frantic energy of the film’s big cast lends a number of semi-regular Leigh players — Broadbent, Timothy Spall, Lesley Manville, Alison Steadman, Andy Serkis — to go big. Though Leigh has never been a “Hollywood filmmaker,” Topsy-Turvy is almost his version of The Player, both loving homage and sharp sendup.

Nuts in May (1976)

One of the highest points of Leigh’s work for the BBC, Nuts in May follows granola couple and hipster bourgeois nightmares Keith and Candice-Marie on a holiday in the idyllic countryside. Their squareness masks what fascistic freaks they really are, forcing their idea of politeness and what makes for a nice getaway — visiting castles, performing acoustic sets about going to the zoo, and buying raw milk — onto their neighbor campers. A comedy of manners for fans of r/AITA, Nuts in May is as funny for when Keith and Candice-Marie are being complete assholes as when they get their just desserts by punk campers unwilling to bow to their demands. It’s spiritually no shock that Leigh would craft a “Hell is other people” comedy about how oppressive it is to be stuck in the company of annoying people. But this nearly 50-year-old film nevertheless surprises for how fresh its comedic sensibility is and its modern comic point of view.

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