Incannerax What a waste of my time!!!

Micah Lloyd Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

Kamila Bell This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Guillelmina The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

classicsoncall Movies like this don't appeal to me on the surface level. Principal characters with a negative attitude and quarrelsome disposition are an immediate turn-off. But Johnny (David Thewlis) is a train wreck in motion and it's hard to avert one's attention from his intelligent dialog, difficult to separate from the idea that he's a social misfit of the first order. Director Mike Leigh makes this film a statement about homelessness, urban alienation, sexual violence and drug abuse, and does so in a masterful way as Johnny makes his way amid a London underbelly on the verge of disintegration. The picture offers any number of derelict characters, and the one that transfixed me the most was that whiplash-head guy who looked like he might have just stepped off a Saturday Night Live set. He would have been right at home with someone like Massive Head Wound Harry. For all his dysfunctional behavior, it was the paper hanger guy who eventually got around to doing what I would have liked to do to Johnny myself, and for a film and an actor to elicit that kind of reaction, it has to be firing on all cylinders. Not for the faint hearted, but if you're having a bad day, this is the kind of picture that might actually lift your spirits.

chase_g An aimless, pointless, waste of time. Painfully overacted, especially by the nurse, but in general the endless speeches of David Thewlis reveal themselves to not be driving at anything in particular. The movie seems a self conscious attempt to show how much angst they can pack into a painfully slow two hours. If you can keep up with how fast Thewlis is talking you will realize that everything he says is only pseudo-intellectual trite word play. The fascination with rape and the scrawny posh psychopath are never shown to have any meaning, and there is hardly any plot to speak of. All of the female characters are an insult to women everywhere, as they fawn obsessively over a grimy tramp, and go on the occasional emotional tirade. The same melodramatic song is looped constantly. And if they were trying to send a nihilist message the millennial 'end is neigh' delusions only serve to remind us that Johnny is simply a nutter.

Spikeopath Naked is written and directed by Mike Leigh. It stars David Thewlis, Lesley Sharp, Katrin Cartlidge, Greg Cruttwell, Claire Skinner, Peter Wright, Ewen Bremner and Gina McKee. Music is by Andrew Dickinson and cinematography by Dick Pope.Johnny (Thewlis) is an unemployed wastrel who has to flee Manchester after indulging in his sexually violent proclivities. Heading for London to seek out an old girlfriend, Johnny encounters a number of people more hapless and lost than he is.Proles, Plebs and Potheads.Mike Leigh's brutal and raw character study remains as potent today as it was on release in post Thatcher Britain. Sometimes coined as a film for masochists or misogynists, Naked is actually for neither. For sure it isn't setting out to cheer you up, it's relentlessly restless and intense, it doesn't cut corners or operate under a banner of political convenience. Yet it does have intelligent depth to the point where the deeper you dig the more troubling Leigh's observations become. This allows Leigh and his brilliant cast to leave indelible images, to bring out themes that simply refuse to leave the conscious, where the observation of a society filled with sad, lonely and desperate people provides the discomfort of the human form stripped, well, naked.Ever seen a dead body?Only my own…Johnny is an intellectual, an intelligent man, even charming, he can chat freely on the world and man's existence in it. But he has unhealthy appetites and a knack for latching onto emotional discord. Posit this with a backdrop of dirty streets, cheap cafés and grungy flats, and there's a starkness about the narrative that scars the soul, aided considerably by Dickinson's edgy violin based score and Pope's stripped back colour photography. A concurrent character study with that of Johnny is that of Jeremy/Sebastian (Cruttwell), the definition of Yuppiedom gone wrong, the devil with a Filofax who is both cruel and predatory, he's the polar opposite of scruffy Johnny, but both represent a London that's far from the bright lights and big city so many hopeless dreamers set off in search of.A sick boy in search of Booze, Beans and a Bath.The Jeremy/Sebastian axis feels very much like satire, this also is something that makes Naked so strong, it is quite often funny. True, the humour here is clinical and comes in spiked barbs, but there are laughs to be had here, the kind that deftly dovetail with a pervading sense of bleakness, finding wit in the most unlikely of places. What is Leigh trying to say in all this? As usual he isn't offering up solutions to his questions, he demands you observe and respond, while he asks his actors to take the material and respond in kind, which they do, led by a quite extraordinary performance by Thewlis. Cannes agreed, awarding Thewlis with the Best Actor Award whilst also bestowing Leigh with the Best Director Award. Both were richly deserved.Never gratuitous, Naked is a sensitive and thoughtful film, yes it's tough to witness at times, it's meant to be, but this is a searing masterpiece that demands to be seen more than once. 10/10

maltese-stallion While this film featured a cast of characters played excellently by the actors, it's plot was much too flat for me to fully enjoy. I absorbed both Nietzsche's theory of eternal recurrence through as explored by the film's character, Johny, as well as themes and motifs explored by the modernist writer, Samuel Beckett. Eerily enough, throughout watching this 1993 British film, I constantly had the feeling that I had already viewed this film.To end, Samuel Beckett's quote: 'I can't go on, I must go on' - while being a quote that may very well be overused by my subconscious - came to mind throughout viewing this film.