Secrets & Lies

A Black optometrist in London goes looking for her birth mother after her adoptive mother dies, and finds a white, exhausted factory worker with no confidence at all. Mike Leigh treats the meeting not as a twist but as two people learning how to sit at the same table. Leigh works through months of improvisation rather than a finished script, with actors developing characters alone and then together. The decisive café scene, where Cynthia recognises Hortense, was shot in a single unbroken take running just over seven minutes. Nothing rescues the actors there; the performance simply has to happen. It won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, where Brenda Blethyn took Best Actress. Five Academy Award nominations followed without a win, though it took three BAFTAs including Outstanding British Film. Made for 4.5 million dollars, it grossed somewhere between 33 and 50 million worldwide. Who it is for: people who watch films for acting, and who want class and race handled without slogans. Who it is not for: anyone looking for pace. This is deliberately slow and built almost entirely out of conversation.