Live stream preview

Watch this video and more on The Criterion Channel

Watch this video and more on The Criterion Channel

Start your free trial

Already subscribed? Sign in

Directed by Mike Leigh

Secrets & Lies

2h 22m

Directed by Mike Leigh • 1996 • United Kingdom

Mike Leigh’s Palme d’Or–winning masterpiece charts the shockwaves that ripple through an already-fractured London family when Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), a successful, adopted black optometrist, makes contact with Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn, winner of the best actress prize at Cannes), her desperately dysfunctional white birth mother, who is woefully unprepared to deal with the situation. With unexpected humor and gripping emotional realism, Leigh crafts an intricate, richly human exploration of the buried tensions and heartaches that run beneath the surface of family life.

Up Next in Directed by Mike Leigh

  • Career Girls
    1:27:10
    Career Girls

    Career Girls

    Directed by Mike Leigh • 1997 • United Kingdom
    Starring Katrin Cartlidge, Lynda Steadman, Kate Byers

    In Mike Leigh’s poignant, deceptively modest follow-up to his international triumph SECRETS & LIES, former college roommates Hannah (Katrin Cartlidge) and Annie (Lynda Steadman) meet again fo...

  • Topsy-Turvy
    2:40:48
    Topsy-Turvy

    Topsy-Turvy

    Directed by Mike Leigh • 1999 • United Kingdom
    Starring Allan Corduner, Jim Broadbent, Timothy Spall

    The world of Gilbert and Sullivan comes to vivid life in director Mike Leigh’s extraordinary dramatization of the staging of the duo’s legendary 1885 comic opera THE MIKADO. Jim Broadbent and All...

×