Naked

Mike Leigh's Naked (1993) was a startling swerve into darkness for the director, and it won him Best Director at Cannes and his star Best Actor. After the gentler humanism of Life Is Sweet, Leigh turned to a bleak, furious vision of a Britain hollowed out by the Thatcher years. It is still his most savage film, and his most divisive.

David Thewlis gives a ferocious, motormouthed performance as Johnny, the homeless intellectual whose dazzling, nihilistic monologues (about millennial dread, the futility of work, the end of the world) pour over a series of nocturnal encounters. Leigh, working through his trademark improvisatory process, refuses to soften or redeem his protagonist for a moment. The film's bleakness, including its disturbing treatment of cruelty between men and women, drew controversy alongside the acclaim. Thewlis's verbal pyrotechnics turn Johnny into a portrait of intelligence curdled into despair, and he is impossible to look away from even when you want to.

Critics were divided but largely awed, and its stature has grown steadily since: it is now one of the defining works of 1990s British cinema. Brilliant, abrasive and deeply uncomfortable, Naked pours the rage of a wounded society into a single unforgettable character. This is Leigh at his most uncompromising. Few British films of the 1990s offer so little consolation, or ask so bluntly to be reckoned with.