I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

What makes it different from others?

Absolutely amazing

Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

Slowly I am becoming a big fan of Mike Leigh and his kind of film making. I like his style. I have a read a few interviews of his and the way we deals with his actors and executes his scenes and narration is a kind of new school of thought for me. Secrets and Lies was one of the highly recommended movies of Mike Leigh, and it became pertinent for me to watch it. It is story of Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) – a successful optometrist - who after her adopted mother dies, traces her birth- mother Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn) a working class lady living with her frustrated daughter Roxanne (Claire Rushbrook) a street cleaner. Slowly Hortense and Cynthia open up and build a LOVE-bond of mother- daughter which brings a new lease of life to Cynthia's mundane and problematic existence. When Cynthia invites Hortense to Roxanne's birthday party held at Cynthia's brother Maurice's (Timothy Spall) residence – the secrets are revealed of who is Hortense? Who was the father of Roxanne? Who was the father of Hortense? Why Maurice is still not having children? The last half an hour is a roller coaster ride of tension and tear- jerking emotions. But all ends up well in the end. Secrets penetrate and each character empathizes with the other to live happily thereafter.That is the strength of a good optimist positive director Mike Leigh that reflects a belief in good human nature and their goodness. The acting of Brenda Blethyn as Cynthia is immaculate. She lives the traumatized hysterical yet endearing character to the hilt. Kudos to her! The other performance that stands out is of Timothy Spall as Maurice, whose character plays a nice binding force in the family.There is an unnecessary sub-plot of Maurice at his photo-studio – which could have had been over-looked. What I like about director Mike Leigh is that he lets his characters flow naturally and takes their own life. Shows a lot of his theatre style where actresses are given freedom to improvise on the spot. Secrets and Lies is for those who enjoy family movies that highlight good human relationships.I would rate the movie 7.5 out of 10.

Secrets & Lies (1996) A character study. Multiple characters. Examining relationships, those with family, those with friends, those with ourselves. Denial and truth. The lengths we will go to achieve these things. How easily we learn to deceive not only our nearest and dearest, but even ourselves. Secrets and lies. Oh, how they tear us apart. I was never bored. I was anxious to not have to listen to Cynthia Rose Purley's high pitched whining, part crying and part toddler throwing a fit. Her voice! That accent! "Sweeet- Art!" I did like her earrings. The same pair she wears throughout the entire film. Christ. Even when she finally tells her family the truth regarding Hortense- a genial affair- she starts crying, her entire face crumbling, sniffling and whining like a puppy dog. Maybe I cannot blame her. After all, her daughter Roxanne treats her with fervent enmity. With a level of disrespect no one should deserve, let alone her mother who raised her so selflessly. Ironically, it is after she finds out that Cynthia has been lying to her, neglecting to tell her about her half-sister all these years, that she begins to treat her more kindly. Even Roxanne's lover Paul is grating, not saying much but somehow still effusing nonchalant lack of compassion for others. The early parts with Maurice were filled with arguing, tension, and pessimism. ("Life isn't fair then is it. Somebody always draws the short straw.") Which would be fine if there were any payout. Sadly, I felt nothing but more depressed. As a photographer, I was entertained by the montage of customers in his studio (like the cosmetologist who scars her face in an accident and the couple who start out smiling and end up giving the most forced smiles after arguing about what will look good behind the lens). Cynthia is to Roxanne as Maurice is to Monica. That is to say, maybe we cannot blame him for his miserableness. His wife Monica does not seem to love him at all, if the way she treats him is any evidence. We later find out her inability to have children and unwillingness to share this with anyone else has caused extraordinary strain on their marriage. What is with the score? Weird music and at awkward moments. A background score should be exactly that- in the background. Here, it is distracting. The one thing that rescues the film is the one with the most unwieldy name, Hortense Cumberbatch. The main character- a young black woman who is at her mother's funeral in the introductory scene and spends the rest of the film hunting down and getting to know her white birth mother (despite her first trying to deny her parentage)- is played by Marianne Jean-Baptiste, whom I instantly recognized from her role in the "Without A Trace" series. Her performance was not flawless (like the other characters, a little overdone at times; which means it could more likely be attributed to the director's choice), but praiseworthy, especially considering this was only her second feature role. She was, by far, the most likable and relatable character. And she spends more than half of the film rolling her eyes or visibly wanting to. She seems to me to be as annoyed and fed up with the film as I was. The last fifteen minutes of this film, on its own, would garner an exceptional rating from me (8). When the truth finally comes out. The performances actually shine; the characters are finally in the situational context in which their histrionics are not overdone but understandable. Unfortunately, I had to wait two hours to reach this point. Two hours that meandered unnecessarily; that could have accomplished what it set out to accomplish within a quarter of that time. "Secrets and lies! We're all in pain! Why can't we share our pain?... You are a very brave person. You wanted to find the truth and you were prepared to suffer the consequences. I admire you for that. I mean it." This is a character story. Thus, a little difficult to appreciate when the characters involved alternate between maddening and simply tiresome.

Life isn't perfect, people aren't perfect either, they are sometimes annoying. We might forget it and think our life is crap, with all the films that we can see at the cinema. Always perfect characters, brave, pretty, even when they cry, but nobody is pretty when they cry, etc... For once it is not the case in this film ant it makes me feel relieved. The characters are sometimes annoying, like Cynthia with her hysterical crises, but it makes them more human, realistic. A few weeks ago, I met Timothy Spall ( who plays Maurice) with my high school and he told us about the process of Mike Leigh's creation of characters . The actors worked a lot improvising the scenes to build up their character's personality traits. That is why their performances were so great, they perfectly embody their characters, it is impressive. This film is breath-taking by its realism, I've loved that. I've also liked Mike Leigh's way of filming, like the scene at Maurice's workplace at the beginning, when he tries to make is clients smile, that was well filmed. It is really an Oscar-worthy movie, I totally understand why it won a prize. But there were two scenes which annoyed me though. It was with Monica. The fact, that she is represented as the perfect housewife who cleans the room and cooks is very sexist I think. I mean, Maurice's and Monica's couple were too much a representation of the « traditional couple » to me. And the scene where she is angry because she has her period was so cliché ! Despite these scenes I've loved that film, and I highly recommend it, to people who want realism in movies. I really want more films like that one.

Mike Leigh's my kind of filmmaker. This is a man who just loves people, especially the ones who have a lot of emotional baggage. But what separates the artists from the hacks - from stuff like Secrets & Lies from a soap, and the characters here could easily be that - is taste and talent. Leigh has good taste and he knows how to steer the ship when it comes to getting a group of actors together and getting them to reveal things through the characters. The love for these people comes through in the filmmaking, in the time given for things like a few good shots that lasts for minutes (not to where it becomes obvious, but that there's no *need* for a cut), and the deep range of the human experience: compassion, envy, spite, forgiveness, love, hate (though how much these two last is hard to say), and understanding are among those in the film.It even could've been something close to a sappy/saccharine Guess Who's Coming to Dinner scenario, given that it's essentially about a black woman who discovers her biological mother is white. We never see the father - no need to, it was one of those bad moments in teenage years that isn't easily forgotten, but it's been put into a corner of memory for Brenda Blethyn's Cynthia at this point in her life in this story. But race isn't at all a big issue, and that's one of the first strong things to know about this film - at the same time, the filmmaker is aware of what he's putting out there, and hopes (or maybe knows) the audience will not only buy it, they'll look to what is much deeper: the pain of loss of that mother/daughter connection, but all of that other history each character has. What I mean to say is that race is not unacknowledged here, but it's not the primary focus.What you get in Secrets & Lies is the story of people at work in their relationships and their everyday lives. The people in this film are relatively working class - perhaps doing a little better than not are Hortense, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, is an Optometrist, and Maurice, Timothy Spall, the brother of Cynthia, runs a photography studio - but we see that they have the work that they do and the people they're close to. That's it, and that's what counts for Leigh. But of course the title itself is not to be taken lightly; the structure is kind of built upon it, of what secrets/lies will be revealed through the due course of the film, even those I didn't think really that deeply about. And yet, as a great dramatist, it's right there in front of me, in the subtext of Leigh's scenario and in what the characters say as much as the up-front stuff (Maurice's marriage for example).There's time taken to set up the characters, and I loved that about the film as well. A soap might just dive right into the 'Who is your birth mother' plot-line, or maybe after so much uninteresting time setting up people, to the point of who cares. But we know who they are with just their behavior - Cynthia's fragile form, her daughter's 'Leave me alone mum!' manner, and of course Maurice, who as a photographer has to try to make people happy. Some of those montages, by the way, are simply delightful, full of the kind of empathy that can be seen from a filmmaker in just flashes: even as they're just sketches of people, they feel fully realized, albeit once or twice as jokes. So that when Maurice does this, and then goes home to his wife and the OK-but-tense relationship there, we know where his head may be at. Also interesting is the fact that we aren't shown that Maurice and Cynthia are brothers right away - why are their stories connected, if at all - until he comes over to her house and that itself is a tremendous scene.This is the sort of cinematic experience that had me on the edge of my seat merely by the emotional stakes of those involved. How the family may or may not find out isn't as crucial as how it will affect them, how we might (or just will) be affected by them. Blethyn may be shedding a lot of tears here, but she's playing a damaged, depressed person, and it never comes into question why she acts the way she does, and Leigh, as with his other films (especially the even more uncomfortable-in-a-good-way Naked) never judges. Other characters may do that to others, especially as things rile high to the surface, but he won't. You want to know what happens to these people once the film ends, and Leigh leaves you wanting more, genuinely so, not in any cheap way.