If you've ever felt your life is a dead end or going nowhere, take a look at some of the more recent films of two of Britain's best filmmakers, Mike Leigh and Ken Loach. In film after film, they invariably showcase working class people, always of meager economic means, usually under situations of extreme duress and always on the verge of coming apart. If you find your life even a quarter as difficult, consider yourself lucky. Mike Leigh's new film All or Nothing, chronicling the dead-end lives of a handful of working class Brits, is a frank and intimate character study that ranks as one of his finest.

In the 60s, British films like Look Back in Anger and Saturday Night, Sunday Morning were nicknamed "kitchen sink" dramas, sure to contain the domestic problems of the underclass, frustrations and pressures that led to knockout familiar confrontations and sobering truths. All or Nothing, like much of Leigh's work, fits comfortably in this particular style. It features the intersecting lives of a group of friends, neighbors, children and parents co-existing in a lower-class housing project. There are alcoholic parents, unwanted pregnancies, alienated teenagers, and general hopelessness pervading everyone's lives. All the characters, regardless of age or motivation, are at life-changing crossroads, and most of them will be tested before the film concludes.

At the center of the group lies a hard-working family led by a cabbie (a sad-eyed Timothy Spall) and supermarket checker (Lesley Manville). They have two young adult children-both overweight; one very angry and the other quietly resigned to a job in a retirement home. They have emotional barriers in their family that have been there so long they seem insurmountable. It seems apparent that the many years of full-time working parents and lack of communication have taken a toll on their ability to function as a family. Even sitting down for a quick dinner together is a painful experience. Indeed, nearly all the grown children in the film have little surface use for their parents, addressing them with hateful profanity every chance possible. And the well-meaning parents are seen as inconvenient intrusions, tip-toeing around their children's fragile psyches.

All or Nothing is one of Leigh's very best films, and that's saying a lot when you consider his resume. For my money, Secrets and Lies is still the most mature and intriguing film, but All or Nothing gives it a run for the money. The film charts the relationships, hopes and disappointments of the ensemble with amazing sensitivity.

By now just about everyone knows that Leigh's films get much of their honesty and truth from his improvisational way of handling his actors, usually scriptless, until the substance is born from their instincts. And every time out, he gets a passionately committed cast to go through the most rigorous, exhausting motions - you half wonder how his actors get back from the traumatic turns on which he takes them.

While All or Nothing is conceptually an ensemble piece that interweaves a sad mosaic of characters at the ends of their respective ropes, the film is carefully and deliberately organized to lead up to its intimate final half hour, which is essentially a painful two-character chamber piece between Leigh regulars Spall and Manville, whose marriage comes unglued in the aftermath of a family tragedy. The scene is of an intensity rarely seen in film today, and hard-won by its terrific actors, who along with Leigh manage a Herculean task of spilling their emotions without lapsing into sentiment or melodrama.

In the concluding moments, Leigh finds small notes of optimism and family reunification, which is heartening, in a film that so carefully sets up a sobering, depressing milieu.