High Hopes

In this early film, award-winning director Mike Leigh uses a loose, open-ended narrative structure to unsettle cinematic expectations and create a truly inventive and very honest film. High Hopes opens with the arrival of Wayne, a small-town lad in his twenties, in the London metropolis. Completely ...more

After working for nearly two decades almost exclusively in British television, writer/director Mike Leigh asserted himself as a feature film director with this sly, rousing study of various malcontents languishing in Margaret Thatcher's upwardly mobile 1980s London. Leigh's loosely devised film is a series of incidents among a half-dozen or so residents of a London neighborhood, of varying ages, political convictions, and economic status. Though each character is essentially an archetype of ...more