Sorrow and pity for the whole human race, or at least the English race, courtesy of the magnanimous Michael Winterbottom (Butterfly Kiss, Jude, Welcome to Sarajevo). He, at the outset, draws a circle around a diverse and disconnected group of Londoners (and periodically widens the circle to include countless anonymous faces in the crowd), and we wait to learn their relationship to one another. The ghastly image — grainy, gravelly, pebbly surface, decomposing color, scrambling camera — fosters impatience and even indifference. But the players — Gina McKee, Molly Parker, Shirley Henderson, Jack Shepherd, Kika Markham, Ian Hart, John Simm, and more — are uniformly good, albeit in a uniformly harsh, naturalistic, unflattering light; and the characters eventually can come to grow on you, especially McKee's, a lovelorn waitress with her hair twisted up symmetrically into two bumps resembling cat's ears. Her late-night leave-taking from a hot date and her lonely bus ride home afterwards constitute a painfully exact calculation of the distance between romantic dream and sordid reality. (2000) — Duncan Shepherd
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