01
All or Nothing
Why this pick
Leigh again finds piercing humour and compassion in a strained working-class family, building toward emotional honesty through richly observed everyday frictions.
A FILM WORTH A CLOSER LOOKTHE FEATURE PRESENTATION
MOVIE1996 2h 22m GBR
IF THIS ONE STAYED WITH YOU
Movies like
Secrets & Lies
Drama
CINEHUNCH / THE NEXT FRAME
Keep the feeling.
SIMILAR PICKS / A PERSONAL CONNECTION
If you loved Secrets & Lies, try these.
01
02
Another Year
Why this pick
Its patient, naturalistic attention to friendship, family rituals and loneliness carries the same humane ability to make ordinary conversations quietly devastating.
03
Life Is Sweet
Why this pick
A warmer, more comic portrait of a London family, with the same improvisatory-feeling performances and affection for people struggling to say what they need.
04
The Son's Room
Why this pick
This intimate family drama shares Secrets & Lies’ emotional precision: grief gradually exposes the misunderstandings and durable love beneath domestic routine.
05
Happy-Go-Lucky
Why this pick
Another sharply observed London character study from Leigh, balancing buoyant humour with a clear-eyed sense of private pain and social pressure.
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01 / THE STORY
A little about the film.
Hortense Cumberbatch, a successful Black British middle class Optometry in London who was adopted as a child, has chosen to trace her family history after the death of her adoptive mother. After being warned by public officials about the troubles she could face by tracking her birth mother down, she continues her investigation and is baffled to learn that her birth mother is white but does not resent this fact and wants to know more about her mother's past. Her birth mother, Cynthia Purley, is working class and downwardly mobile. Hortense meets her and later meets Cynthia's brother, Maurice Purley, a photographer, his wife Monica, and Cynthia's daughter Roxanne, a street cleaner.
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02 / FACES IN THE FRAME
The people who bring it to life.
Timothy Spall
Maurice Purley
Marianne Jean-Baptiste
Hortense Cumberbatch
Phyllis Logan
Monica Purley
Lee Ross
Paul
Elizabeth Berrington
Jane
Michele Austin
Dionne
Brian Bovell
Hortense's Brother
Emma Amos
Girl with scar