One of the best films to emerge from Britain in the eighties, Leigh's second theatrical feature in seventeen years widened his international audience, won critical acclaim, and then...zzz. Michael Sragow and The National Society of Film Critics include it in the anthology Produced and Abandoned: The Best Films You've Never Seen. Now's your chance. The setting is London in the age of greed: mid-to-late Maggie. Cyril and Shirley (Philip Davis and Ruth Sheen) share a small flat, a meager income, a prickly cactus named Thatcher, and a warm love bolstered by their disdain for materialism. Cyril and Shirley are trying to decide whether to bring a child into this imperfect world. What doesn't help is: Cyril's mother, edging into senility as gentrification edges her out of her council flat; her two comically callous Yuppie neighbors, the Boothe-Braines; and Cyril's nouveau-riche sister Valerie, hell bent for bad taste. What does help is persistence of vision-Leigh's, and Cyril's. Of course Leigh's hopes are about as high as Dickens' expectations were great, but there is a palpable shift here from Meantime: what hope there is, is in the human race.