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It’s unsurprising the actor has yet to direct another film after giving so much to this blistering debut, acted at full tilt by a remarkable cast

Twenty-five years ago, Gary Oldman opened an artery of anguish with his brilliant, wrenchingly emotional debut as writer-director inspired by his own father and his childhood in south London, positioned between Terence Davies and Martin Scorsese. The title conveys with horrible force both violence and the cost of violence. “Nil by mouth” is what you see over an intravenously fed patient’s hospital bed – and yet the phrase is also a metaphor for the dad’s dysfunction, the walled-off emotional aridity; nil by mouth, no kissing, no talking, nothing.

It is an urban pastoral and social-realist tragedy. Watched again now, you can appreciate how formally accomplished it is, how emotionally extravagant, and acted at full tilt by a remarkable cast. Ray Winstone is Ray,...

The Margaret Thatcher era left an indelible mark on British cinema – not all of it negative. Here we select some key films that distilled the essence of Thatcher's Britain, for better or worse

My Beautiful Laundrette, 1985. Dir: Stephen Frears

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The spirit of free enterprise underpins the Hanif Kureishi-scripted, Stephen Frears-directed comedy – mordant but forward-looking in its equation of immigrant thrift with modern conservative values. Omar, son of a campaigning journalist-in-exile, turns to launderette-management, drug-stealing and inter-ethnic gay sex to boot. Genuinely groundbreaking in its subtle and empathetic portrait of a British Asian community, My Beautiful Laundrette was a teasing provocation to the mindset of the 70s old left. Daniel Day Lewis, of course, made a massive impact as punk rocker Johnny, a stereotype confounder who deserts his street-fighting confreres for Omar's charms. Kureishi's prescience even ran to the...