Michael Winterbottom has made many fine movies humanising the routinely despised - asylum seekers, alleged terrorists, and so on - but with 'Everyday', his portrait of a man with a long term prison sentence, he might possibly have done better to cast a harsher light on his protagonists. John Simm's gentle character hardly seems like a major criminal; and the struggle of his wife to raise their family alone is softened by its setting in the beautiful (and beautifully lit) English countryside. The drama centres on visits, rather than the routine of prison life, and uses a fair amount of soft-focus music . It's a sensitive but surprisingly unacerbic portrait of the consequences of being sent down; in places its moving, but its also clearly non-political - don't look here for an analysis of "broken Britain".
Review of Everyday
