Opens: May 16
Duration: 154 minutes
Genre: Historical drama

Mike Leigh is a filmmaker with an instantly recognisable style that began with a series of brilliant BBC TV plays and moved to the international spotlight with a stream of strikingly original tragicomedies for the big screen.

Peterloo, Mike Leigh

Ever since 1999’s Topsy-Turvy, about the light opera maestros Gilbert and Sullivan, he has developed an occasional and no less personal strain of work based on real-life historical characters, and his latest project falls into this latter category. The climax, with its cast of hundreds, is the notorious 1819 “Peterloo” massacre, where British cavalrymen, freshly returned from defeating Napoleon at Waterloo, slaughtered peaceful pro-democracy protestors in Manchester’s St Peter’s Field, though most of the film concerns the myriad events leading up to this massacre.

You might call it Leigh’s Battleship Potemkin, in reference to Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 Russian silent classic that climaxed with a massacre on the steps of the city of Odessa. Although Leigh’s thumbprints are instantly recognisable as his, the film plays out on a scale far larger than anything he has previously tackled.