An exhilarating movie about sadness and renewal.

Exquisitely textured film.

There are moments in All or Nothing of such acute observation that we nod in understanding -- The closing scenes of the movie are just about perfect.

It's a remarkable film; the dialogue takes our breath away with its sharp skewering of expectations and realities, the bleak honesty is balanced by the freshness of real life and moments of raw truth and comedy -- Don't miss it.

Mike Leigh returns to the council flats of London -- and delivers a richly Dickensian masterpiece about working-class family life.

It's a strangely stirring experience that finds warmth in the coldest environment and makes each crumb of emotional comfort feel like a 10-course banquet.

All the drinking, arguing and brooding, which in lesser hands might have produced oppressive and unvarying dreariness, somehow adds up to a tableau of extraordinary vividness and variety.

The acting in All or Nothing is superb. Everyone creates a character we can immediately register and recognize as true.

No picnic to watch -- Leigh's camera is unsentimental and unsparing.

A comic and moving examination of life in an impoverished South London housing complex, features marvelous performances, especially from Leigh stalwart Timothy Spall.

Though it's become almost redundant to say so, major kudos go to Leigh for actually casting people who look working-class; you'd be hard-pressed to get an American studio to go along with that, even though Leigh alumni often become famous.

Hollywood hardly ever pays attention to such people, and the average moviegoer won't either. But Leigh makes an irrefutable claim that their lives matter, and that attention must be paid.

Leigh's uncanny ability to mine emotional truth packs the usual punch. And the trademark flashes of humor sprinkled throughout ease the bleakness of the landscape.

Leigh doesn't sentimentalize these tragic, dead-end lives but allows his characters to be ugly and stupid, to make horrendous mistakes. Sometimes they're laughable, and yet there's never the sense that Leigh is mocking them.