Ray & Liz

The photographer Richard Billingham's first feature is about his own family. Billingham became known for a book of photographs published in 1996; the people in it, his father Ray and his mother Liz, are played here by actors. The film is set in a council flat on the edge of Birmingham in Thatcher-era Britain and looks at three separate periods in the family's life. Drink, unemployment, children left to themselves and time accumulating inside a closed flat are its material. Billingham neither condemns this life nor asks for pity; he builds light, texture and objects with a photographer's eye, and it is genuinely funny at moments. What comes out is not nostalgia but the sense of a record. Who it's for: viewers who like British social realism and autobiographical cinema. Who it's not for: anyone who would rather not look closely at addiction, neglect and poverty; the film softens none of it.