The brilliant and controversial Naked, from director Mike Leigh, stars David Thewlis as Johnny, a charming and eloquent but relentlessly vicious drifter. Rejecting anyone who might care for him, the volcanic Johnny hurls himself around London on a nocturnal odyssey, colliding with a succession of other desperate and dispossessed people and scorching everyone in his path. With a virtuoso script and raw performances from Thewlis and costars Katrin Cartlidge and Lesley Sharp, Leigh’s depiction of England’s underbelly is an amalgam of black comedy and doomsday prophecy that took the best director and best actor prizes at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival.

***

Naked is the angriest, most bitterly critical attack on the false values of society that Mike Leigh, Britain’s constant chronicler of the tragic comedy of desperate lives, has ever made. Its audacity is that the attack is mounted through a central character of whom few would approve. Johnny (David Thewlis) is, in fact, a classic antihero, who blasts away at the hypocrisy inherent in the Britain of the immediate post-Thatcher era much like a latter-day version of John Osborne’s Jimmy Porter. Yet such is the power of the film that Leigh is also able to include, without in any way seeming to placate his audience, moments of compassion, gentleness, and humor, which prevent Naked from seeming merely a bilious, if gloriously eloquent, rant. It is not just that. In fact, it is one of the greatest, most memorable, if decidedly uncomfortable, British films not only of its decade but of the entire second half of the twentieth century.

Excerpt from Derek Malcolm's included essay.

Disc Size: 46,212,909,651 bytes

Edition Details:
• Audio Commentary by Leigh and actors David Thewlis and Katrin Cartlidge
• Original Theatrical Trailer
• Exclusive new video interview with director Neil LaBute
• The Art Zone: 'The Conversation', a BBC program featuring author WIll Self interviewing Mike Leigh
• The Short and Curlies, a 1987 short comedy directed by Leigh and starring Thewlis
• Plus a booklet containing new essays by film critics Derek Malcolm and Amy Taubin

Blu-ray Release Date: July 12th, 2011
Transparent Blu-ray Case

Chapters 43