Meantime
Produced for Britain’s Channel 4, Leigh’s bleakly comic drama shuttles between the Pollocks, a working-class East End family headed by working mum Mavis (Pam Ferris) and on-the-dole dad Frank (Jeff Robert), barely scraping by from day to day, and Mavis’s sister, Barbara (Marion Bailey), “enjoying” the comforts of suburban Chigwell and a loveless union with husband Alfred Molina. Tim Roth, who’d made a splash earlier the same year in Alan Clarke’s Made in Britain, plays Colin, the younger of two Pollock brothers, but the breakout role here goes to Gary Oldman as Coxy, the swaggering, very possibly psychotic skinhead whose menacing mien Colin yearns to successfully imitate. A barbaric yowl out of the tortured guts of Thatcherite England.
Distributor: Janus Films
DCP