valleyjohn You have to be certain type of person to like Mike Leigh's movies. They are never very cheery simply because they are about real people and generally working class people at that. I find his films fascinating and All or Nothing is no different. Leigh tends to use the same actors in many of his films and because they know exactly how he works ,the film works also. This movie is pretty grim even by his standards but not grim in a bad way ( if that makes any sense!). Timothy Spall is superb as a downtrodden taxi Driver who's life is in the doldrums as is the rest of his family. This must have been one of James Corden's first appearances on screen and he's not bad at all. Daniel Mays is particularly brutal too. If you like films about people and their day to day troubles you will love this. It feels almost as if you are intruding on these characters private lives and they are lives that you wouldn't particularly want yourself.

Framescourer A distant companion of the rash of late 90s realist urban films set in London estates, along with the likes of Wonderland, Nil by Mouth and Intimacy. Mike Leigh's film starts, roughly speaking, from a position of tense, impecunious stability and simply slides through the misery gears. It's a very difficult, unrelentingly bleak film to watch with no humour (black or otherwise) to leaven the experience.I suspect that the development Leigh has in mind for Phil's family is that they learn to value one another through the events of the film. The issue I have is that they seem unhappily resigned to a situation of mutual, coexistent alienation in the first place. Unlike Leigh's other films, the drama is externally applied rather than coming from one or other of the protagonists. The acting is of a high standard although the actors are, in this light, pawns rather than agents and I find the film consequently weak. 3/10

fedor8 Solid drama, and quite weepy, the way Leigh makes them nowadays. There's practically no humour at all, which is a shame. He used to do these sorts of "heavy" dramas but with a degree of pathos and wit, which raised its level well above other kitchen-sink dramas. (I always thought Leigh did these films the way they should be done, unlike the hopelessly overrated Ken Loach.) "Naked" was excellent, "Meantime" and "Bleak Moments" were very good, "Life Is Sweet" was good, but "All Or Nothing"?... Merely average, and quite forgettable. Spall's comedic potential is wasted. He plays a miserable, ultra-depressed, overweight cab-driver who suffers from the fact that his wife (apparently) no longer loves him. His kids are extremely over-weight; the son is a lazy, unmannered slob, and the daughter is hard-working but withdrawn, extremely shy. His wife is miserable, too – but you could have guessed that. The other characters? Mostly miserable, frustrated Londoners – you know, that sort of thing. Leigh covers no new ground here. It's just another family drama targeted at female audiences (and pretentious male ones). It is a bit annoying that Leigh opts for the "safe and easy" route by doing an all-out drama. We all know that writing a drama is incomparably easier than writing one which has comedy in it. Leigh has become lazy. Either that, or he wants to be even more recognized as an "artist", and what better way to do that than by making all-out drama like that abortion-rights movie he did recently. The critics loved it – predictably. An interesting cast, the acting is quite good, but where are the laughs?

MrSqwubbsy It strikes me that this sort of stuff bewitches the French etc at their film festivals because they fatuously see in it a corrective to the Curtis/Grant Cool Britannia, "red London bus school" of UK film-making but in reality it's just as false and fatuous -- all that Leigh's ladelled out here is an unappetising,lardy dollop of council estate ennui, over two hours of it, with precious little action and few of the light comic touches that he usually throws in to keep us engaged. Either he doesn't have it in him anymore or he felt that keeping it unrelentingly bleak this time marks him out as a more serious film maker. Whatever,it's an unwelcome and redundant return to Mean Time territory (now over over 20 years old) that reeks of the late '70s/early '80s and,despite its pretensions has little of the flavour of modern Britain. Everything here feels laughably out-of-date -- from the tarty estate girl (who looks like a refugee from some obscure '50s British black-and-white movie) to the comedy alcoholic mum (who reminds me of the bint in the Fat Les "Vindaloo" video). Only the subject of obesity gives it any contemporary feel. And a fat lot of good that is! In short, Leigh's gone back to basics here, tried to "do a Ken Loach" and produced a real gobbler that is not worth feeding to the dog on Boxing Day. Here's the plot,such as it is -- a bunch of uninteresting, taciturn working class folk living in Bermondsey eke out a turgid existence (no sign of drugs though-hmmm,has Mike read any newspapers lately?) variously getting pantomime drunk at karaoke evenings (can't remember her name but that character was so laughably simplistic that I almost took her to be a post-modernist joke slipped in!), now and again shouting at each other, having listless sex, and barely able to conjure up a wry larf between the lot of them. Who do ya think you are,Mr Mike Leigh,with your paternalistic middle class inversely-romanticised view of working class life? Oi Leigh, NO-O-O-O! Don't you think that these people can still have fun? Geez,this is as bad as Woody Allen when he decided to "go serious" and make Bergman movies,but without any of the feeling or the skill. Here Leigh's tried to remake himself, 20 years on but forgot to look out his window and see what'd changed! Ferchrissakes,these people would have topped themselves if this was all that life had to offer them! Really you're every bit as out of touch with that class as are the poor old writers of Eastenders,who also seem to think that all their working class characters are fit for is barneying and throwing themselves at every passing bit of skirt 5 minutes after the wedding ceremony! Now,I used to be big Fan of Leigh's right back to Nuts in May and up to Life is Sweet, but it needs an aficionado not a sycophant (and nowadays Leigh's got his fair share of the latter on both sides of the Channel!) to blow the whistle on bombs like this one. Please,I implore you, forget this exists, go back to the early funny ones and don't,but don't, for pity's sake watch the vox pops from the actors without a sick bag to hand. Come in Mr Leigh your time is up!