Nil by Mouth

Director: Gary Oldman

1997 / 128min / DCP

Set in the hardscrabble South London of the filmmaker’s own youth and dedicated—in a more than slightly ambivalent gesture—to the memory of his father, Gary Oldman’s disarmingly raw debut as writer/director/producer flings us into a working-class family’s lives of profane squabbling and substance abuse as lived in the pressure cooker of a council estate flat: tyrannical father Ray (Ray Winstone); long-suffering wife, Val (Kathy Burke); Val’s junkie brother, Billy (Charlie Creed-Miles); Val’s mother and grandmother (Oldman’s sister, billed as Laila Morse, and Edna Doré); and the couple’s young daughter, who has no choice but to soak in the ambient trauma of her surroundings. “Unflinching and observant… There is humor in it, and tender insight… We sense Oldman’s ability to understand, if not forgive.” —Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics

Part of Gary Oldman: The Protean Man