England,
1988, 110 min
Shown in 1989
CREDITS
- dir
-
Mike Leigh
- prod
-
Victor Glynn, Simon Channing-Williams
- scr
-
Mike Leigh
- cam
-
Roger Pratt
- editor
-
Jon Gregory
- cast
-
Philip Davis, Ruth Sheen, Edna Dore, Philip Jackson, Heather Tobias, Leslie Manville, David Bamber
- source
-
Skouras Pictures
-
COMMENTS
Mike Leigh in person.
OTHER
The standing-room-only crowds who turned out for our 1986 Mike Leigh retrospective delighted in discovering a social satirist of Hogarthian proportions, a brilliantly talented filmmaker virtually all of whose work had been made for (and restricted to screenings on) British television. It has taken three long years for his new feature to get made (his first big-screen production since 1970's Bleak Moments), but the initial public screenings of High Hopes at film festivals in Venice, Telluride, New York ("the festival's only memorable discovery" wrote Vincent Canby in the New York Times), and London were smash successes. We are delighted to celebrate Mike Leigh's long-awaited triumphant return. Alternately hilarious and very moving, High Hopes centers on Cyril and Shirley, a working-class couple living in a tiny London flat and their involvement with, in Clyde Jeavons' words, "a suburban moron, a near-senile mother, nouveau-riche relations and some appalling, over-the-top yuppie neighbors." If the film veers at times into caricature, it more than makes up for it by Leigh's (and his cast's) seemingly miraculous creation of one of the most down-to-earth and engaging couples (Philip Davis and Ruth Sheen) ever seen in a movie.
—Peter Scarlet
FACTOID #95
Later to find fame with the amnesia-tinged film noir update Memento, British director Christopher Nolan was nominated for the SKYY Prize in 1998 for his first feature Following. Nolan shot the film about a writer who stalks strangers, on weekends over the course of a year on a budget of $6,000.
