Mike Leigh’s intimate portraits of the domestic lives of British everymen and women would qualify as soap opera if they weren’t so unsentimental. In All or Nothing, the working-class characters who cross paths in the stairwell and the cement courtyard of a bland housing complex struggle with the problems that have long been staples of kitchen-sink drama: loneliness tempered by alcohol, teen pregnancy, frayed marriages. Whereas Leigh’s best-known film, Secrets and Lies, intersected middle-class and working-class characters, All or Nothing is a decidedly gritty look at blue-collar lives.

The focus is on Leigh-film staple Timothy Spall as cabbie Phil, whose glum passivity prevents him from eking out much of a living. At home, gloomy Phil clashes with his hard-working spouse (Lesley Manville) and his two kids, a chubby malcontent of a son and a quiet daughter who cleans a nursing home. The wisecracking mother next door (a moving performance by British character actress Ruth Sheen) who takes in ironing and belts out "Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue" at a local pub struggles with her own family issues until a third-reel crisis connects the two households. It’s a challenge for a writer to create emotional expression for characters who are by nature and social standing retiring or inarticulate or both; Leigh deftly creates a powerful slice of life by revealing the wrenching pain that weaves through these seemingly uneventful lives. (128 minutes)