I’ve been a Mike Leigh fan since 1977’s Abigail’s Party (as good as Molière). Naked is, I suppose, his deepest film.

| May 2, 2024

Naked is a rarity that you only stumble upon once or twice in a lifetime.

| Sep 23, 2022

A fascinating, aggressively verbose slice of British squalor.

| Original Score: B | Aug 31, 2022

This is the greatest David Thewlis performance, in one of the greatest Mike Leigh films.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Nov 12, 2021

This is a movie of virtuoso nihilism and scorn.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Nov 11, 2021

An anti-epic -- retrofitted to the consciousness of an antihero raging into the close of a century, the end of the millennium.

| Nov 13, 2018

Naked proves well worth the wait.

| May 23, 2018

Once Johnny's babble of half-baked ideas and hand- me-down theology begins to pall, we're bogged down in the slough of despond, with only the banality of evil for company.

| Dec 7, 2017

This is an astonishing film in a number of ways, a tour de force that's brilliantly played and written and directed with total conviction.

| Mar 4, 2015

Naked is a revelation, a parable of spiritual homelessness and the terror it engenders.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 4, 2015

Mike Leigh's Naked is a great one -- a film of brutal impact, withering wit and humanity. It deserves one of the highest accolades movies can receive: Seeing it shakes you up, changes your vision.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 4, 2015

If America's nightmare self-image is Bad Lieutenant, this is the British answer: just as driven, visionary and self-destructive but not needing an excess of drugs or blood to showcase human horrors.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 4, 2015

Thanks to David Thewlis' performance, which has been collecting prizes since last spring's Cannes Film Festival, Johnny's energy and ferocious wit outweigh his brutishness.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 4, 2015

You may feel like you need a drink and a shower when you come out of Naked, but at least you'll know you've been somewhere new.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 4, 2015

By the end of the film, there's even something vaguely inspirational about our antihero's painful journey through the bowels of his self-created hell.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 4, 2015

Sorting out the intelligence from the hysteria is no easy matter, and the picture rubs our noses in this uncertainty so remorselessly that we sometimes forget that what we're watching is largely a comedy.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 4, 2015

There are also moments of tenderness, necessary chinks of compassion spearing the murk. It's also bitingly, appallingly funny. And it's a masterpiece.

| Mar 4, 2015

It would be hard to imagine a film much sourer than Naked, but sourness is not a fault, merely a characteristic. Hollowness, now, self-indulgence, a sort of gloating emotional ugliness -- those are faults.

| Mar 4, 2015

Thewlis, who won the best-actor prize at Cannes for a performance so perfectly perverse that much as you want to, you cannot turn away.

| Mar 4, 2015

Watching this lost soul's flaming descent is a disturbing yet exhilarating experience. Leigh makes art out of his own ambivalence.

| Mar 4, 2015