Secrets & Lies
- 1996 film
Mike Leigh's comedy drama in which an adopted optometrist sets out to find her birth mother. Also features Brenda Blethyn, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Claire Rushbrook, Timothy Spall, Phyllis Logan and more.
Criterion Collection: Secrets & Lies
Mike Leigh's quietly devastating, cathartic exploration of the fault lines beneath one family's ordinary life.
Writer-director Leigh reached new levels of expressive power and intricacy in his ongoing contemplation of unembellished humanity with this resonant exploration of the deceptions, small and large, that shape our relationships to those we love.
When Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), a black optometrist who was adopted as a child, begins the search for her birth mother, she doesn't expect that it will lead her to Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn), a desperately lonely white factory worker whose tentative embrace of her long-lost daughter sends shock waves through the rest of her already fragile family.
Born from a painstaking process of rehearsal and improvisation with a powerhouse ensemble cast, Secrets & Lies is a Palme d'Or-winning tour de force of sustained tension and catharsis that lays bare the emotional fault lines running beneath the surface of everyday lives.
This special edition release as part of Sony's internationally acclaimed Criterion Collection features a new HD digital restoration of the film, supervised by director Mike Leigh and director of photography D. Pope.
First released: Monday 26th April 2021
Extra features
- New conversation with Leigh and composer Gary Yershon
- New interview with actor Marianne Jean-Baptiste
- Audio interview with Leigh from 1996, conducted by film critic Michel Ciment
- Distributor: Sony Pictures
- Region: B
- Discs: 2
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