High Hopes

1988

Action / Comedy / Drama

8
Rotten Tomatoes Critics - Certified Fresh 92% · 13 reviews
Rotten Tomatoes Audience - Upright 85% · 1K ratings
IMDb Rating 7.4/10 10 5756 5.8K

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Plot summary

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 stages a surprise party for mum's 70th birthday, a disaster from start to finish. Shirley holds things together, and she and Cyril may put aside her Dutch cap after all.


Uploaded by: FREEMAN
September 02, 2019 at 03:49 PM

Director

Top cast

Lesley Manville as Lætitia
Jason Watkins as Wayne
Phil Davis as Cyril
David Bamber as Rupert
720p.BLU 1080p.BLU
970.01 MB
1280*720
English 2.0
NR
24 fps
1 hr 48 min
Seeds 1
1.73 GB
1904*1072
English 2.0
NR
24 fps
1 hr 48 min
Seeds 2

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by framptonhollis 8 / 10

funny, sad, and sweet!

Surprisingly, this is the first Mike Leigh film I have seen. and I am glad to finally be exploring his filmography since he has intrigued me for quite some time, and I am happy to say with full enthusiasm that my first Leigh movie watching experience was wonderful.

"High Hopes" is a slice of life type film in which there is little plot, but rather a series of events that serve almost as a two hour long snapshot taken at a very specific time in the main characters' lives. While there are many interconnected characters displayed, each with their own mini story arc that can range from light comedy to dark tragedy to somewhere in between, at the center of the film is a likable young couple. A political undercurrent runs throughout the final half hour of the film dealing with the state of England under Margaret Thatcher and the beliefs of a socialist and Marxist, which is all quite interesting even if it makes the film somewhat outdated (but, with me, that isn't much of a problem); however, the film, in the end, is no so much about politics and ideology, but more so about the human spirit and its many triumphs and failures, life and it's many ups and downs. I fell in love with some of the characters in this film, and always felt deep care and concern for them. One shot in particular will always remain in my memory; it is the haunting image of an elderly women on her seventieth birthday as her family explodes (not literally) into chaos behind her. We can only see the elderly women, and we can only hear her screaming, bickering family members under the melancholic sounds of the film's often bleak score. This fragile lady is left to do no less than stare into nothingness, a fragile victim of the world's evils. But...this film is not a hopeless tragedy; rather, it is a hopeful comedy in the end, for, in the end, positivity seems to conquer the tears and tragedies that plagued the film in earlier moments (although not EVERY character seems to receive a "happy ending").

This film is a(n often darkly) humorous look into the lives of some very realistic and unique individuals as they struggle and smile through life. It is a film about love, compassion, strength, weakness, loneliness, politics, society, intimacies, and more. A beautiful feat of comic and dramatic filmmaking that sadly remains overlooked and obscure to this very day; fortunately, Mike Leigh was still rewarded in later years with a reasonably successful and highly praised career made up of many movies critics claim to be masterpieces, many movies that I now cannot wait to get my hands on!

Reviewed by boblipton 7 / 10

Don't Be Bitter

Edna Doré's birthday is coming up. She's a feeble old widow living in a house in a gentrifying bit of London. We encounter her posh neighbors, her Marxist son, her upwardly mobile sot of a daughter, their partners, a couple of neighbors, and a guy wandering around looking for a job. Mostly she seems out of it.

It's a movie written and directed by Mike Leigh, which means, in this period, that it doesn't seem to have been written at all, just an assortment of people who run into each other and and act awkwardly with each other, like the Method actor's advice: don't act, behave. But how do you behave when it turns out you don't kow how to behave?

It doesn't appear to be a story, except that it is, centering on Miss Doré's son, played by Phil Davis, and his live-in girlfriend, played by Ruth Sheen. It's a beautifully realized relationship. I guess that's how Leigh wrote it.

Reviewed by writers_reign 7 / 10

High Hopes Low Fruition

To watch a movie like this again - I saw it on release and now it's a freebie with a Broadsheet - is to wonder aloud why Mike Leigh, who proves here that he CAN write an Original screenplay, felt compelled to rip off Chabrol's Une Affaire des femmes in Vera Drake. Like much, if not all of Leigh's output this is an ensemble piece and if the labels on each character are writ in Bold Face - Socialist brother, Capitalist sister, Yuppie couple etc - that's just a minor flaw in Leigh's make up, he is, after all, firmly entrenched in the Ken Loach anti-Capitalist camp but unlike Loach he does remember to entertain the audience and not just preach at them. This movie revolves around a fragmented family; brother Cyril is so steeped in Socialism that he is allowed to make schoolboyish statements like 'the day they machine gun the Royal Family is the day I'll wear a tie', whilst sister Valerie is heavily into conspicuous consumption and their old mum is slowly descending into a twilight world of short-term memory loss and confusion. Mum still lives alone in the house she's presumably occupied all her married life and where the brother and sister have been raised but the once run-down neighborhood is going up-market so the yuppie couple next door comprise a third couple. This is primarily a vehicle for an ensemble cast and each actor takes his own particular ball and runs with it whilst the director juggles those same balls. It was perhaps a mistake to let Heather Tobias play not only Abigail from Abigail's Party but play it in the style of Leigh's ex-wife Alison Steadman who created the role of Abigail but against that there will be younger viewers who never saw Abigail's Party. The sequences involving Jason Watkins peter out not quite half way through which raises the question of what they were doing there in the first place. The biggest negative is that the film is primarily a study of 'North London' types (Breaking And Entering uses the same locale)and other North Londoners will recognise and possibly sneer at themselves and their friends/neighbors but it's difficult to know what they'd make of it in Leigh's native Salford. If you like fine acting you came to the right place but if you like taut, well-made screenplays chances are you'll be disappointed.

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