10 Essential Mike Leigh Films To Watch This Holiday

Mike Leigh is probably the single greatest benefactor to Britain’s film history in the last fifty years, and yet the average British film fan may have only heard of a handful of his films. His background in Britain’s theater and teleplay scene in the 70s was predated by extended schooling in different top-tier art schools. By the time his film career was making incredible strides in the 90s, he was already working with some of the key collaborators that would return for many future films – including actors Jim Broadbent, Timothy Spall, Alison Steadman, and cinematographer Bill Pope – and who all showed dedication to the craft of the authentically ordinary.

Leigh has made the texture of Britain’s social and political landscape his muse for fifty years, often centering on the mechanics of working-class life or honing in on the structural disparities that invade it. His characters come from long stretches of intimate, improvised rehearsal with his actors, leading to a continuous streak of reflexive and instinctive performances no matter his subject matter. 

As Hard Truths, his latest drama about divisions in contemporary London, reaches American cinemas, here are ten essential films that map out the director’s singular vision of Britain.

British telly used to be a thriving scene of new writing, with original anthology teleplays airing weekly – so long as they kept the budget down. After debuting with a small-scale film, Mike Leigh proceeded to make theater for TV, and Abigail’s Party, a late 1970s comedy of manners set at a cringe-inducing and dysfunctional suburban social gathering, is a diamond in his rougher early career. 

Alison Steadman (Pride & Prejudice) gives a perfectly pitched comic performance as the excruciating, aspirational middle-class party host – Britain has been the king of cringe comedy for decades.

Abigail’s Party is streaming on BritBox.

One of two feature films Mike Leigh made during Margaret Thatcher’s tenure as Prime Minister (even though the shadow of her administration hangs over his films for years after), Meantime is a bleak, raw drama that shows Thatcherist recession through the eyes of an East London family. 

Notable for starring soon-to-be-famous actors like Tim Roth, Gary Oldman, and Alfred Molina, Meantime was a big stepping stone for Leigh back into a feature film after decades of shorts and TV plays.

Meantime is available via Prime Video as a streaming rental.

Mike Leigh had such a terrific '90s that Life is Sweet, his shrewd, affecting story of family chaos and employment blues, isn’t even one of his top three films of the decade. What wouldn’t someone give to have Alison Steadman and Jim Broadbent (in his first of many appearances in Leigh films) as parents, even if their family home feels too dysfunctional to bear? 

The twin daughters Natalie and Nicola (Claire Skinner and Jane Horrocks) emerge as the emotional anchors of a film about the family unit trying to cling together in an optimistic but challenging new decade.

Life Is Sweet is streaming on the Criterion Channel.

Arguably, Leigh’s most famous and revered work, Secrets & Lies, is a melodrama about the truths we willfully keep from those who need to hear them. It is the apex of his films about interpersonal dysfunction. Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn) is a lonely, neglected woman whose daughter mistreats her and whose brother (Timothy Spall) is too emotionally inarticulate to be there for her. 

Enter Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), her Black biological daughter who wants to meet her birth mother, who triggers a flood of guilt, shame, and reconciliation that unfolds around tables and in comfortable front rooms.

Secrets & Lies is streaming on Max.

Prestige-courting historical biopics aren’t Mike Leigh’s brand – so if his biographical films like Mr. Turner do attract prestigious attention, it’s not because they were insincere Oscar bait. Artist  J. M. W. Turner (who is honored by the Tate’s annual Turner Prize for exemplary visual art) is Leigh’s subject here, played masterfully by Timothy Spall, and the film charts his difficult inner life and the unorthodox lengths he went to to realize his expressive genius.

Mr. Turner is streaming on Amazon's Prime Video.

Naked is a contradictory work – it’s simultaneously Mike Leigh’s most off-putting and most entrancing film, making us spend a bleak day or two in the pessimistic and provocative company of Johnny (a never-better David Thewlis), who weaponizes his intellectualism only to belittle, dominate, and intimidate the city-dwellers he spends his time with over a long, lonely night in London after fleeing retribution in Manchester. 

Filled with evocative, two-person theater scenes, this view into a profoundly sick country simmers with thorny, unspoken psychological impulses.

Naked is streaming on the Criterion Channel.

One of Leigh’s bleakest works, Vera Drake, has lost none of its anger towards working-class injustice in the 20 years since its release. Imelda Staunton (The Crown) plays the titular Vera, whose close-knit family in 1950 London is jeopardized by her work performing illegal abortions. Coursing through the naturalistic family scenes is anger; Vera is being criminalized for fulfilling a basic necessity for many women. 

Her work is encouraged by the subplot of a wealthy woman (Sally Hawkins) who seeks a legal abortion after being raped but is subject to invasive and misogynistic questions from medical professionals. Very few characters act in the interest of women’s health.

Vera Drake is streaming on Netflix.

A companion piece of sorts to Mike Leigh’s latest film, but instead of looking at a jaded, rude, and guarded older Londoner, Happy-Go-Lucky unfurls the philosophy of Poppy (Sally Hawkins), a 30-year-old, perennially cheerful primary school teacher. 

As she takes driving lessons from grumpy instructor Scott (Eddie Marsen) and navigates her sisters’ criticisms, Hawkins and Leigh balance Poppy’s sunnier outlook on life with the drawbacks of trying to see the best in people, even if they are acting with malice.

Happy-Go-Lucky is available via Prime Video as a streaming rental.

An ambitious period drama, Mike Leigh paid homage to the iconic British theater duo Gilbert and Sullivan (who together wrote HMS Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance, and a dozen other comic operas) with Topsy-Turvey. However, by focusing on theater's repertory, bringing the dramatist and composer’s work to life, Leigh wrote a love letter to his own stable of returning talent in front of and behind the camera. 

In a delicious series of vignettes, as the hit show The Mikado is staged, Leigh manages to bring forth every single one of his regular crew. There’s plenty to love here besides the nominal story of Gilbert (a mustached Jim Broadbent) and Sullivan (Allan Corduner) mending their fractious relationship with Orientalism.

Topsy-Turvey is streaming on Max. 

Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s return to Mike Leigh-dom in Hard Truths is a tour de force, exposing the interpersonal tensions and spirals that dominate urban life that were noticeably worsened by the anxiety and suspicion of a global pandemic. Pansy (Jean-Baptiste) snaps, scolds, and spits through her fraught family life, assuming everyone is out to get her and purposefully distancing herself from self-reflection and compassion. 

Leigh’s writing has lost none of its wit or incisive bite, but Hard Truths is fueled with a bitterness that only a select few of his projects can handle.

Hard Truths will be released in theaters in the U.S. on Friday, December 6, 2024, and in the U.K. on Friday, January 31, 2025.