Film Forum

“Richard Billingham’s blisteringly honest photos of his alcoholic dad and his mountainous, tattooed mom – Ray and Liz, as they have come to be intimately known – were the toast of Charles Saatchi’s epochal late ‘90s exhibition Sensation.” – Elizabeth Fullerton, British art critic. One of Britain’s most celebrated artists, Billingham has made an autobiographical debut feature that immerses the viewer in his Midlands childhood of loveless squalor and parental obliviousness. Despair is laced with humor and boredom with cruelty. RAY & LIZ stands in stark contrast to Ken Loach’s quasi-heroic working class stories. But because this film is made by a first-rate artist, there is a strange beauty that shines through the rampant horror that suffuses everything we see and hear. Billingham is an original.

UK    2018    108 MINS.    KIMSTIM

Reviews

“A finely textured, unsentimental portrait of working-class life. A precise, patient portrait of personal working-class memory. A sense of an analogue past is also retained in the film, specifically in choosing to shoot on celluloid… The important thing [the filmmaker] believes, was to capture the emotional truth of those memories. This painstaking recreation of memories echoes another of his acknowledged influences: Terence Davies’s TRILOGY. But alongside the fear and sadness, there are still moments of genuine fondness…  A complex mixture of affection, critique and melancholy remains.”
– Adam Scovell, Sight + Sound

“Billingham does an incredible job. [He] doesn’t romanticise a single molecule.
All hail an instant classic.”
– Charlotte O’Sullivan, London Evening Standard

“Formally arresting and rigorous, though not at the expense of its direct emotional force… [with] gallows humor of an especially inky hue. Directed with unflinching, taut-wired dread, it’s a concentrated, claustrophobic one-act drama rife with life-or-death tension and concentric circles of abusive behavior… [Jason, as a young man is] played with exquisitely helpless bravado by the remarkable Joshua Millard-Lloyd. RAY & LIZ stands as a uniquely moving work… bristling with pride, anger and even some regret.” 
– Guy Lodge, Variety

“Billingham soaks his terrific debut in bleak authenticity and some gorgeous cinematography. These figures are archetypes of an England that’s fucked.”
– Chris Waywell, Time Out (London)