A dense portrait of the tiny discomfiting gestures, irritable glances and physical tics that build to a sudden eruption of bone-crushing rage.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Nov 4, 2022

It is an urban pastoral and social-realist tragedy.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Nov 3, 2022

Nil By Mouth offers a harrowing look at a working-class family beset by drugs, alcohol and abuse.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 9, 2018

Oldman goes after a Mike Leigh- Ken Loach kind of low-downness, a slice of crappy working-class life that’s also a chance to slice open his own vein and let hot blood therapeutically flow.

| Original Score: B | Sep 7, 2011

Rough, tough but with an underlying generosity toward its characters... an impressive writing-helming debut cloaked in a torrent of profanity and loutish, abusive behavior.

| Mar 26, 2009

Shot and scripted in a deceptively casual, bleakly 'realist' style, it's the closest Britain has produced to a Cassavetes film, and as such, profoundly humane.

| Jan 26, 2006

There's so much authenticity and raw emotion here that most viewers will be able to excuse the fact that they don't understand any of the dialogue.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 24, 2005

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Apr 12, 2002

This brutal cinema vérité depiction of a prodigiously screwed-up English family emphasizes the semantic inadequacy of such words as “dysfunctional” and “codependency.”

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 1, 2000

The cycles of misery that are seen reinforced here, among helplessly bullying men and their downtrodden women, would seem a lot more bleak without the liberating wisdom that galvanizes the film.

| Jan 1, 2000

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 1, 2000

Nil by Mouth is painful, sometimes disgusting to watch, and sometimes gratuitous in its wish to shock us with the grinding tragedy of its characters. And yet there's integrity in Oldman's unvarnished portrait and undeniable bravery in his actors...

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 1, 2000

Something primal, needful and anguished is going on here.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 1, 2000