"I love all of Mike Leigh’s films but this is the one that had a big impact on me. Like all of films above, it beautifully combines comedy and drama. It was also a stylistic departure for Leigh, who still held on to the British social-realism vibe but delivered it in a very cinematic and calculated way. Also should be seen for Katrin Cartlidge who had a very bright but tragically short career."

"An early sixties, black and white British gem from John Schlesinger. Tom Courtenay plays a dreamer who wants to bust out of his small town with the help of Julie Christie. One of the saddest endings to a comedy I’ve ever seen. I saw John Schlesinger give a Q&A after a special screening at the Film Forum, and he said he didn’t feel that the ending was sad at all, just appropriate to Billy’s character."

"Being swept up in British pop culture and its swinging sixties scene is something that I am not close to alone in and yet may be hard-pressed to explain. Well, the British are so beautiful, and you can’t understand a word they’re saying. Screaming girls and Beatle haircuts may provide some distraction, but A Hard Day’s Night captures the mood of a traumatized postwar culture just as effectively as other, starker films of the “new” British cinema. In Billy Liar, Tom Courtenay’s Billy could be a famous Beatle in the making except that comedy writing is his calling, and the more eccentric and imaginative he allows himself to become creatively, the clearer it is how stifled he is by his family, his lack of self, and his generally dismal surroundings. The bleakness and futurelessness are so embedded in this character’s outlook and ultimate outcome that even the sway of Julie Christie’s modern vivaciousness and beautiful smile can’t compete with his inability to rise out of his own sorry lot in life. Just a little bit heartbreaking."