Although it starts off just looking like a dull film about glum women, this tale of 'secret shames' unnecessarily withheld from nearest and dearest is really rather good. In fact it's director Mike Leigh's best to date. A bit too long overall, it has two or three excellent scenes that stick in the memory, and was deservedly Oscar-nominated in its year. A young black businesswoman (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), still grieving for her late foster-mother, decides to seek out her birth mother. To her surprise (and everyone else's) it turns out to be frumpy, cotton-headed (white) factory worker Brenda Blethyn, whose other daughter (Clare Rushbrook) is a council roadsweeper. Meanwhile the other half of this family, Blethyn's brother (Timothy Spall) and his barren wife (Phyllis Logan) live in luxury thanks to his photographic, and her interior design, talents. Expected skeletons come tumbling out of the cupboard at a subsequent party and every actor gets a big emotional scene. Spall, Logan and Blethyn have some exceptional moments here, and Blethyn and Jean-Baptiste were Oscar-nominated.

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