Naked

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

That wonderful British writer-director Mike Leigh continues down his brave, lonely road, making movies about believable people living and suffering under painfully believable circumstances.