Click here to copy URL

High Hopes

1988

Mike Leigh

Phil Davis, Ruth Sheen, Edna Doré, Philip Jackson ...

6.9

495

Comedy. Drama Slice-of-life look at a sweet working-class couple in London, Shirley and Cyril, his mother, who's aging quickly and becoming forgetful, mum's ghastly upper-middle-class neighbors, and Cyril's pretentious sister and philandering husband. Shirley wants a baby, but Cyril, who reads Marx and wants the world to be perfect, is reluctant. Cyril's mum locks herself out and must ask her snooty neighbors for help. Then Cyril's sister Valerie ... [+]

	Author	Review
United States	Roger Ebert rogerebert.com	"'High Hopes' is an alive and challenging film, one that throws our own assumptions and evasions back at us (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 4)"	POS
United States	Janet Maslin The New York Times	"[It] manages to be enjoyably whimsical without ever losing its cutting edge (...) Though the actors are all good, Miss Sheen (...) is outstanding"	POS
United Kingdom	William Thomas Empire	"Life may have changed a bit since 1988 but families never change and for that reason, this story of the social gulf between rich and poor still holds water (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 5)"	POS
United Kingdom	Time Out	"A superbly crafted and unsentimentalised study of age and survival"	POS
United States	Hal Hinson The Washington Post	"The picture works on an impressive number of levels (...) At its funniest, the comedy has such a dark undertow that, watching it, you may feel drugged, blindsided. Afterward, you may not know quite what hit you"	POS

Return to movie

We encourage you to check the reviews' original sources. Intellectual property rights of these reviews belong to their authors and/or the correspondent media from which they have been extracted. If you'd like to help us to add more reviews to your favorite movies, just send us a message.