Nil By Mouth

Newly remastered by the BFI National Archive for its 25th anniversary, Gary Oldman’s directorial debut, which won two BAFTAs for Best British Film and Best Original Screenplay, remains an unflinchingly authentic dark and dazzling masterpiece.

Set in the same south-east London streets where he himself had grown up, Oldman’s debut as a writer-director is an uncompromisingly frank and powerfully astute portrait of a particular sector of working-class family life, one marked by unfettered machismo, booze and drugs, petty crime, domestic abuse and hair-trigger violence.