Tayloriona Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Adeel Hail Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

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

Staci Frederick Blistering performances.

rob94 This film is great, it really is. Its an insight into how people like this live, it takes us through hell, then brings us back, we go on a journey with this life. The film has many ugly and beautiful moments. In the first half i thought Billy's heroin addiction was bad but by the end of the film after we've seen Ray and Valerie's issues with domestic violence and alcoholism, i thought Billy actually had an easy life in comparison, so it just shows how bad people's lives are. The scene where Ray Beats Valerie to a pulp is heartbreaking and disturbing and the aftermath of what he'd done to her was just hard to watch. I felt so sorry for Valerie having to live and raise children with Ray, the drunk lunatic. However even Ray shows at the end of the film that he's capable of being a sensible, rational, family man - which is what I found most interesting about the film, how after such violence and madness, how the family was able to fall back to normality at the end. This film is a realistic picture of a dysfunctional and flawed family. Drugs, alcoholism, violence, crime, profanity is normal to these people. As an audience it becomes normal to us too. The cinematography and music are just fantastic, beautifully put together. The acting, especially Ray Winstone and Kathy Burke is some of the best acting i have ever seen... I wanted to cry about three quarters through the film after it had sunk in just how bad some of the problems these people had, despite such hell the film seemed to continue at its chilled out and steady pace, like real life does. There is literally no way anyone can say this film isn't authentic and outstanding cinema, its just an absolute gem. It makes you laugh and cry, and feel sorry for these poor people who are less fortunate than yourself. So touching and beautiful yet so hellish and sad.

epat I'm a sucker for Cockney films. I've got a few Cockney pals & I'm fascinated by their accent, slang & wit, but this is not Lock, Stock & Two Smoking, mate. Not even close.I first watched Nil by Mouth several years ago under the erroneous impression Gary Oldman acted in it; I disliked it & soon put it from my mind. Recently though, a friend talked me into seeing it again & I have to concur, it really is an intelligently conceived & superbly crafted film. It's totally & utterly real in every detail, from the mists of rage-blown spit during Ray's outbursts to the ambient pub noise & people talking over one another that semi-obscures the dialog. (English subtitles would have come in handy here.) But the very realism that makes this film so brilliant is what makes it so excruciating to watch.First-rate performances are turned in by Charlie Creed-Miles, whose Billie is so spot-on you never really notice the acting; by the ever-beguiling Steve Sweeney as Billie's geezer mate; & by Laila Morse as the quietly suffering mother of a junkie son & an abused daughter. But all of these are overshadowed by the extraordinary performances of Ray Winstone & Kathy Burke.Nil by Mouth is about family — & dysfunctional doesn't begin to describe it. Young Billie, who at first seems be shaping as the main character, serves more as a foil for the rest of the family than anything else. He leads the life of a junkie, scamming & scheming, begging & stealing, jones-ing & winding up in one jam after another. Predictable. Ray, on the other hand — in a tour-de-force portrayal by Ray Winstone — is so full of brooding violence barely held in check as to be totally unpredictable. We never learn what it is he does for a living, but we can make an educated guess that it's nothing on the up-&-up. The only good times Ray knows center on pubs & lap-dancers & even then he seems on the verge of rage half the time.Kathy Burke, in her quietly understated role as Ray's wife Val, is almost equally brilliant, drawing on hidden strength you never suspected she had after a horrific beating at Ray's hands. Perhaps the most moving scene in the film is when she starts dancing a bit at her grandmother's flat where she's recuperating. She dances clumsily, haltingly — clearly still in a lot of pain — but she embraces this life-affirming activity nonetheless, even assuaging the fears & anguish her gram feels for her by drawing her into the dance.Ray's chillingly restrained drug- & alcohol-induced psychopathy as he wakes Val from a sound sleep to interrogate her & his total savagery when he assaults her are outright terrifying. But his utter breakdown afterwards, the staggering lunacy of it, the verbal rehearsal to an empty flat of all his apologies & excuses, the glossing-over, the utter lack of remorse, his besotted attempts to woo her back over a phone he's too drunk to even hold on to... these add up to one of the best acting performances I've ever witnessed. His later revelations about his childhood as he sits drinking with his mate Mark leave you with a tinge of... not sympathy — you can't muster sympathy for an animal like that — but perhaps an inkling of insight into the tortured soul that makes him who he is.And this, I think, is the focus of the film, the unbroken chain of binge-drinking & father-to-son brutalization that breeds ever more of the same for all involved. In its realism, the only film I can compare it to is Martin Scorcese's Mean Streets, but Mean Streets never cut this deep.The ending is left open to interpretation. This isn't Hollywood; there never was a plot, nothing's neatly resolved, no comforting closure here. Is this a temporary truce or is it worse, a genuine rapprochement? It's impossible for the viewer to forgive Ray his brutality, and yet you're left with the sinking feeling that Val will & the cycle will go on.

Rodrigo Amaro "Nil by Mouth" is a very striking and non predictable movie about absence of love or strange forms of love, agressiveness, addiction and other forms of self destruction and or the destruction of a family in this case. Here a poor family living in a working-class London district has too many problems to deal with that they don't see that they're living dangerously. Raymond (Ray Winstone) is a controlling man that starts to lose control of his acts after throws Billy (Charlie Creed-Miles), his wife's brother, out of his house after he steals some of his merchandise. Billy is drug addict and he returns to Raymond's house to steal some things and that makes Raymond even more angrier making of him a more violent person than he is even beating up his pregnant wife Val (Kathy Burke). In the middle of all this confusion there's Janet (Laila Morse) Billy's mother a very hard working mom who also has to deal with Billy's addiction, and the constant menaces of Raymond.The plot takes some time to mesh but when it does you try to expect something very predictable and that's not what you're gonna find here. In the beginning all we see is a amount of funny conversations à la John Cassavetes between Raymond and his friend Mark (Jamie Foreman, looks like a mix between Neil Jordan, Dr. Oz and John Michael Higgins) one completing each others story (they got some funny and strange stories, the best one is about Mark's heart attack). The introduction to all the characters is quite odd and a little bit difficult to follow but when the real deal starts it becomes more and more interesting. Actor Gary Oldman's first film as writer, director and producer is very impressive not only in his writing but also in his style as director. The screenplay is very surprising, alternating drama with a little bit of humor and towards the ending a very breathtaking thriller. Oldman included many things about his life in London. You may feel a little shocked with some of the things presented here. To me two scenes were very powerful in this sense: First when we see Janet watching his son Billy using drugs in front of her, and she says to him "Go to the back seat, I don't wanna see it!" but then she looks at him injecting drugs with a expression of curiosity. Second scene: is when Raymond freaks out, drunk and kicks his wife suspecting that she has an affair. This scene and the aftermath showing what happened to her face is very impressive, almost hard to look at it. Oldman's style as director is brilliant. He filmed the movie with a visual of a Brit movie of the 1980's with the language and editing with a frantic rhythm of the 1990's movies reminding "Trainspotting" in some moments. His direction of actors is incredible and you must give this guy a credit considering that almost the entire cast is unknown (except for Ray Winstone). He really must consider directing another movie because he's really great. It might seem that "Nil by Mouth" has too many clichés about dysfunctional and violent families and that sort of thing but I think the way Oldman presented the story was very original, a little different than the usual things. By the way the ending is one good example. It shocked me the way things worked between the characters and how their problems were solved out of the blue despite all the running tension throughout half of the movie. That surprise was good but it might seen non-plausible, non-realistic and very weird to some viewers. I loved the explanation of the title (the movie's title didn't get a translation here so it was a mystery to understand it but Ray Winstone explained it in one of the most memorable scenes of the movie). See this movie if you can and be patient with its imperfect moments and the long conversations in the beginning. 10/10

Framescourer I can't recommend this film as a date movie. Gary Oldman's semi-autobiographical account of life lived on a South East London estate is a violent, Beckettian account of one of Dante's circles of hell, frankly. At the centre of it is Ray Winstone, who has done this sort of character before but never as well. The film opens with him ordering drinks at a pub bar - that's all - and you are already gripped with a sense of the frustration, self-loathing and barbarism that he exhibits in many different ways throughout the course of the movie. It's an acting masterclass.Of course the stymied and dispossessed need a foil in a drama such as this and Winstone is matched by Kathy Burke as his long-suffering wife, who absorbs and ultimately rejects his unbearable behaviour. Charlie Creed-Miles does an able turn as the fuse-lighting druggie son Billy although he must have wondered sometimes exactly what he let himself in for. Gary Oldman directs close up on the actors, maximising the claustrophobia of their council flat squalor. 4/10