"A bizarre love triangle of shot nerves, heavy sympathy, and bleak regrets. Katrin Cartlidge as Sophie is fearless; David Thewlis as Johnny is repulsively mesmerizing. It’s difficult to forget Mike Leigh’s characters."

"I love Mike Leigh, and this is one of his best. A brutal character study, it’s a journey into the psyche of a man at war with himself and the world. Bleak, hilarious, and uncompromising. Also, the DVD includes Mike Leigh’s wonderful, demented short film The Short and Curlies (featuring another great performance by David Thewlis)."

"Two words: David Thewlis. He gives one of those performances that you can’t believe actually exist. He is an absolute force of nature in this film, playing what is essentially an extremely unlikable character that you can’t help but be completely compelled by. It’s the most verbal movie since His Girl Friday, and experiencing the nonstop dialogue that comes out of Thewlis’s mouth is like witnessing all of the world’s greatest jazz artists playing a euphoric two-hour concert at once."

"Nic Roeg’s disturbing portrait of a creep (played almost too well by Art Garfunkel) investigates the desire that some men have for their women to just shut up and be their playthings. Mike Leigh’s Naked is one of the darkest, saddest, most hopeless depictions of corrupted masculinity in movies. David Thewlis manages to allow for slivers of humanity in his enraged wreck of a character, but Leigh seems to suggest that the world can only make room for these men at our own peril. The ultimate in Rainy Day Bummers, which are the movies I sometimes need to watch to find my center again."

"Nic Roeg’s disturbing portrait of a creep (played almost too well by Art Garfunkel) investigates the desire that some men have for their women to just shut up and be their playthings. Mike Leigh’s Naked is one of the darkest, saddest, most hopeless depictions of corrupted masculinity in movies. David Thewlis manages to allow for slivers of humanity in his enraged wreck of a character, but Leigh seems to suggest that the world can only make room for these men at our own peril. The ultimate in Rainy Day Bummers, which are the movies I sometimes need to watch to find my center again."

"I guess the first one would be the Mike Leigh movie, Naked. The performances in the movie are so great. David Thewlis — it’s just one of the greatest performances I’ve ever seen. And the movie — they improvised to find a script. They improvised for months and months, and then Mike Leigh writes a script based on the improv, and you can tell that it’s come from such a pure place, because it’s natural for all the actors, but it’s also just the — walking around London, and it’s just incredible. And also, my favorite actress of all time is Katrin Cartlidge, and she’s in that movie. She’s ridiculous in it, she’s so good."

"If David Thewlis in Naked is my favorite male performance, then Isabelle Huppert in The Piano Teacher must be my favorite female performance. I saw this with my mom at the theater when I was about fourteen or fifteen and we both loved it so much. I remember thinking, I want to make movies like that. I’ve always felt that the first films he made in Austria, especially the trilogy (The Seventh Continent, Benny’s Video, and 71 Fragments), were a little too academic. He really avoided performances. But when he moved over to France with Code Unknown and then The Piano Teacher, something happened where he started making very passionate filmmaking. The actors are giving great performances while still being very clinical and brutal in their rejection of sentimentality."