All or Nothing (2002)

English director Mike Leigh is not known as a visionary of soft sunlight and gentle birdsong. Unsurprisingly then, Leigh’s difficult, often harsh depictions of Britain’s squeezed middle classes present a people determined to move forward with dignity intact, no matter how grotesquely they have been compromised by outside circumstances. Bittersweet is an insufficient term to describe the observational reality of All or Nothing (2002). Phil Bassett (Timothy Spall) is a pug ugly, pudgy, depressed cab driver with an ugly wife named Penny (Lesley Manville) who counts every dime while working at a supermarket to care for their two, joyless adult children who seem to be on the fast track to becoming just as unhappy and unsuccessful as their parents. The second family we follow is led by Penny's coworker Maureen (Ruth Sheen), whose daughter Donna (Helen Coker) just got knocked up and has no idea how she's going to afford caring after a child. The third fam features Ron (Paul Jesson), a cab driver with an alcoholic wife (Marion Bailey) and a daughter (Sally Hawkins) making a run at Donna's baby daddy. As you could guess, it's not quite a fun, uplifting flick, but it does have Miss Hawkins' cinema, and skinema debut! Before she was nabbing Oscar nominations for riding on top of fish dude dick, Sally was going topless with her tatas out as she did a human man in his car! Who needs to be upper class when being poor gets you that kind of ass? We also see Helen Coker lying in bed in a nighty. We'd rather have seen it all from those two hotties in All or Nothing, but tits and nighties are better than nothing!