Photographer Richard Billingham makes his feature debut with ‘Ray & Liz’, a fragmentary story of a family barely getting by in Thatcher’s Britain. Ray, isolated in a tower block, recalls moments of his earlier life as he (Justin Salinger) and Liz (Ella Smith) spend his redundancy pay, smoking, drinking and seldom leaving the house. Reminiscent of the work of Terence Davies and Andrea Dunbar, Billingham and his cinematographer (‘Under the Skin’’s Daniel Landin, shooting on 16mm) add a cutting nostalgia to these moments of cutting memory in one of the most poignant and personal recent British films.
★★★★ “It’s made with as much love as anger” - Wendy Ide, The Guardian
★★★★★ “Billingham doesn’t romanticise a single molecule of the past” - Charlotte O’Sullivan, The Evening Standard
