Our audience has rated this film:
Nil By Mouth
*Premiere*
Winner, Best Actress, 1997 Cannes Film Festival
"Gary Oldman makes a gut-wrenching, heart-stopping debut as a director. Four stars!" -- Toronto Sun
"In Nil by Mouth, an autobiographical film about growing up in a violent London slum, actor Gary Oldman makes a gut-wrenching, heart-stopping debut as a director. Written by Oldman as a lacerating yet loving film about the people in his life as a youngster, Nil by Mouth is meant as a blues riff [Eric Clapton provides the moody score] about his past, not as a literal fact-by-fact chronicle... [The film] has the ring of truth... Like the greatest coming-of-age classics -- Francois Truffaut's enduring 1959 drama The 400 Blows comes to mind -- Nil by Mouth is a universal story about the emotional and physical pain people inflict on one another. The film's credo hews to the notion that you always hurt the one you love... Shot through with a raw, gritty realism that conjures up memories of the best work from fellow Britons Ken Loach and Mike Leigh, the story focuses on the interaction of the father (Ray Winstone in a brave if thankless performance as an angry and even psychotic man) and the mother (Kathy Burke, a surprise yet deserving best actress winner last year at the Cannes Film Festival). In the mix are other key family members including Billy (Charlie Creed-Miles), a drug addict, and Janet (Laila Morse), the grandmother... Everyone is excellent, natural, convincing. Even casual players and extras seem plucked right off the streets as if the camera were recording reality, not fiction... In a paradox that defies explanations in mere words, Oldman infuses the film with a sense of vitality, energy and hope that is at odds with the actual events unfolding on the screen..." -- Bruce Kirkland, Toronto Sun.
(Great Britain, 1997, 128 min.)
Classification: TBA
Rate this film!
