Naked

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

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, and the film's bleakness, including its disturbing treatment of cruelty between men and women, drew controversy alongside the acclaim. Thewlis's verbal pyrotechnics anchor a portrait of intelligence curdled into despair.

Critics were divided but largely awed, and the film has grown in stature as one of the defining works of 1990s British cinema. Brilliant, abrasive and deeply uncomfortable, Naked channels the rage of a wounded society into a single unforgettable character. It is Leigh at his most uncompromising — a film that offers no consolation and demands to be reckoned with. Thewlis's verbal pyrotechnics anchor a portrait of intelligence curdled into despair, and the film has grown in stature as one of the defining, most uncompromising works of 1990s British cinema.