Last year, Bleecker Street announced a new Mike Leigh film, still untitled, set for 2026 release, and now we have more details on the project, which wrapped production in London.
While the film is still known as “Untitled Mike Leigh 2025” and, as is always the case with the filmmaker, there are no plot details available, at least we have a cast: a quartet of previous on-screen collaborators in Marion Bailey (“Mr. Turner”), Paul Jesson (“All or Nothing”), Kate O’Flynn (“Happy-Go-Lucky”), and Alice Bailey Johnson (“Hard Truths”).
With the passing of Leigh’s legendary cinematographer Dick Pope, with whom he worked on eleven films, the director of photography on this new film will be Lucy Bristow, who started off as a focus puller on Leigh’s ’80s and ’90s films and went on to be his camera operator over the last 20 years.
Leigh is one of the great living filmmakers — Oscar-nominated five times for writing and twice for directing (“Secrets & Lies,” “Vera Drake”) — and at 83, he refuses to retire. And why should he?
It helps that his last film, “Hard Truths,” was great, despite having been rejected by Cannes, Venice, and Telluride (Leigh’s words, not mine). Not to mention the four-year journey during which Leigh struggled to raise the money needed to make it.
What’s even more baffling is that “Hard Truths” cost only a few million dollars to make, yet that didn’t stop Netflix from rejecting Leigh’s pitch in 2021. It’s been a long road for the film, and it does look like the iconic British filmmaker might have had the last laugh.
What seems to scare distributors about funding Leigh is that he’s notorious for not having a script and for not revealing anything about what the film will be, instead exploring and arriving at the story organically. The writing comes relatively late in the process, the result of a close collaboration with his cast.
While we’re at it, I’ll list the indisputable Leigh films — the ones I’ve kept thinking about all these years. You have to start with his Palme d’Or-winning “Secrets & Lies,” and the indescribable “Naked.” His other career highlights: “Life Is Sweet,” “Another Year,” “Hard Truths,” “Happy-Go-Lucky,” “All or Nothing,” “Topsy-Turvy.”