The language of Mike Leigh's Secrets and Lies is intricate and beautiful. An intimate family drama with characters you will learn to hate and then love, this movie justifiably took the Palme D'Or at Cannes this year and the Best Actress prize for its star, Brenda Blethyn.
Set in working-class London, Secrets and Lies is absolutely at odds with Leigh's last work, the disturbing and powerful Naked. While Secrets still holds the power to disturb, it switches the focus back to the family unit, and the issues of adoption and identity.
Working-class Cynthia (Blethyn) is a boozy, mess with a daughter and a photographer brother (Timothy Spall) who shun her.
At the film's onset, black, middle-class Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) begins to delve into her past to discover that her birth mother, Cynthia, is white.
Cynthia is equally devastated by the news. 'You gotta laugh, ain't you sweetheart?' she bleats at their desolate coffee shop reunion. 'Else you'd cry.' The ramifications of this discovery on the five principals of Secrets and Lies are explored with a great deal of honesty - and some wry moments of humour. If this film is at all flawed, and this is only a slight quibble, it is in Hortense's somewhat saintly character. But otherwise, Secrets and Lies grabs your preconceptions by the coat-tails and relentlessly tugs to the final credits.
Striptease, meanwhile, was a fantastically funny Carl Hiaasen novel. But then Demi Moore happened. And you can understand director Andrew Bergman's dilemma: when you have paid Moore a record US$12.5 million (HK$96 million) to strip down to her G-string, it is a wise move to get your money's worth of bare-assed footage. And Striptease, which could have been a great comedy, goes south in an endless montage of topless dancers.
The plot is complex - yet unchallenging - and it has some great moments. Burt Reynolds as a perverted US Senator obsessed by Moore's stripper and Ving Rhames (Pulp Fiction ) as the bar's over-protective security guard alone are worth the price of admission, and the film does deliver its fair share of belly laughs.