Stylish costume design, bio-horror, and the complete Mike Leigh Film Collection: The Best Films of Lesley Manville – Ranked! | film

10. Queer (2024)

Among the bold choices in Luca Guadagnino’s frenetic adaptation of William S Burroughs’s novel is a late-20th-century pop and alternative soundtrack (Nirvana, Prince, New Order) for a 1950s story, and the casting of the unrecognizable, orc-like Manville in a fabricated cameo role as the shaman Dr. Cooter, who was male in the original book.

9. Ms. Harris Goes to Paris (2022)

In a vision of the French capital that makes Amelie look like La Haine, Manville plays a 1950s Cockney cleaner and war widow, who decides to make a windfall with a high-end dress. The film is mush but there is pleasure in seeing Manville take on the caricaturedly smug Isabelle Huppert, bringing the bright cheek and bump to stuffed corsets in Dior. Everything plays like the sunny underside of the Phantom Thread.

8. Sparkle (2007)

This unjustly forgotten romantic comedy features Manville in a breakout role, as a bar singer who rides the coattails of her troubled son (Shaun Evans) when he moves from Liverpool to London. She specializes in cover versions that seem to comment on the plot: in particular Everyone Must Learn Sometime and Do You Really Want to Hurt Me. All of this, coupled with Manville’s endearing scenes with a not-so-secret admirer played by Bob Hoskins, gives the film an extra touch of charm.

7. Cold Storage (2026)

For the first 10 minutes of this horror-comedy, written by David Koepp (who wrote the screenplay for 1993’s Jurassic Park), Manville dons a hazmat suit and battles a colleague infected with a deadly fungus. Not at all the kind of thing Mike Lee would ask her to do, and even more unfortunate. Reunited with Liam Neeson, her on-screen husband from Ordinary Love, she plays a bioterrorism expert who’s not so distracted by extraterrestrial horrors as to neglect health and safety: “Bend your knees, you idiot!” She told Neeson during the upload. She also has a difficult return to the question of how she stayed alive for so long: “Too mean to die.”

6. All or Nothing (2002)

A strong contender for Mike Leigh’s most brutal film. Manville is Penny, a mousy supermarket cashier who lives in a dismal south London estate with her wet mop for her partner (Timothy Spall) and their two adult children. James Corden is her grouchy, spleen-stricken son, who thinks it’s perfectly reasonable to finish the dinner she’s made for him and declare: “That was rubbish” — and then tells his mother to “go away” when she objects. No wonder Penny doesn’t smile until two hours into the movie. (Show duration is two hours and eight minutes).

5. Ordinary Love (2019)

Originally titled Ordinary People but retitled to avoid any Sally Rooney-related confusion, this drama, starring Manville as a woman stoically undergoing treatment for breast cancer and Liam Neeson as her supportive husband, avoids some obvious pitfalls. Cancer and chemotherapy represent little more than a headdress, and the illness reinforces the couple’s common joys rather than heralds any epiphany. The focus on desire is also refreshing. “There aren’t many middle-aged love stories on screen,” she said in 2019. “And I’ve done most of them.” Who over 50s have sex? Let’s get Manville!”

4. Let Him Go (2020)

“America opened up to me,” Manville said after Phantom Thread. Exhibit A: This thriller about a grieving couple (Kevin Costner and Diane Lane) whose ex-daughter-in-law marries a ne’er-do-well after their son dies. Wanting to maintain contact with their grandson, they must reckon with his new family, headed by Manville as the matriarch’s platinum-haired Medusa, who isn’t too shy to deploy an ax if his famous pork chops fail to convince an enemy to see things her way. This is Manville’s “unleashing,” as the Los Angeles Times put it. The ease with which it steals the show should qualify this film as a heist movie in the bargain.

3. Topsy Turvy (1999)

Mike Leigh’s landmark debut is a challenging behind-the-scenes drama about the making of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado, with the wonderful Manville as Kitty, the patient wife of W. S. Gilbert (Jim Broadbent). She conveys the silent exasperation of cheering on a partner who seems impervious to cheerleading, all while maintaining a cheerful and easy-going demeanor. Until that poignant final scene, in which Kitty’s pain at being sterile and ignored is expressed through the only language she can be sure will register her on her husband’s radar—the kind of dream images that might have been ripped from one of his operettas. It’s a carefully judged moment, where the emotional gates creak under pressure without completely bursting.

2. Phantom Thread (2017)

What’s infinitely scarier than Reynolds Woodcock, the 1950s British clothing manufacturer played by Daniel Day-Lewis, is his sister Cyril. It is a role that gives Manville room for endless variations on the initial, frustrated or tightly planned smile. The affectionate term Reynolds gives Cyril – “Old Flanty” – makes her sound like a cuddly teddy bear, but nothing could be further from the truth. She does her brother’s dirty work, “abandoning” not only her employees but his romantic partners as well, and fighting for territory with those who make it work — like the waitress Alma (Vicky Krieps), whom Cyril smells when they first meet, as if they could smell blood. The Oscar nomination that came Manville’s way was the least you could expect.

1. Another Year (2010)

Manville has been collaborating with Mike Leigh for nearly half a century, beginning in 1979 with the radio play Too Much of a Good Thing (not broadcast until 1992). But Another Year, for which she was nominated for a BAFTA, represents the director’s bravest and most complex work. As the film moves through the seasons, the actress charts the emotional disintegration of Mary, the clingy, distraught friend of Tom and Jerry (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen), a passionate and somewhat abusive London couple who indulge in her chaos and self-pity (“Why do I always make mistakes?”) until she crosses the line. Manville can elicit contradictory reactions from the viewer in the space of a single scene, or even a single line; From laughter to horror, from sympathy to extreme annoyance. Her face is an open book with tear-stained pages, and her performance is a transparent record of how deeply others’ happiness can be wounded when your own is in short supply. The film ends with a minute-long close-up of Manville, and the music fades away until all we are left with is silence and the full searing force of Mary’s loneliness.