Grade: C+

Perhaps Mike Leigh’s unusual blend of social consciousness and improvisational technique is running out of gas. His latest effort showcases some fine acting and includes a few deeply powerful moments, but in comparison to his earlier films it seems a disappointingly thin slice of lower-class London life; despite the title, “All or Nothing” amounts to surprisingly little.

The script, fashioned as usual by Leigh in conjunction with the performers, centers on a group of families who are neighbors in a seedy south London apartment complex. Most of the action–or more often inaction–centers on the Bassetts: hangdog-faced Phil (Timothy Spall), a chubby cab driver with little drive and less ambition; his mousy common-law wife Penny (Lesley Manville), who works as a grocery checker; and their overweight children Rachel (Alison Garland) and Rory (James Corden). The girl is a sorrowful, contemplative sort who works as a general factotum at a nursing home, while the boy is a bitter, lazy layabout constantly at odds with his mother. Down the hall lives Maueeen (Ruth Sheen), who does laundry and ironing on the side to support her surly daughter Donna (Helen Coker), a waitress having a difficult time with her bullying boyfriend Jason (Daniel Mays). Finally there’s Ron (Paul Jesson), also a cab driver (but one consistently getting into accidents), and his alcoholic wife Carol (Marion Bailey); their vivacious daughter Samantha (Sally Hawkins) has the hots for Jason, but is being stalked by a strange and vaguely creeper admirer called Craig (Ben Crompton).

With the exception of single mom Maureen, who’s consistently up and perky (and, during an open mic night at a local pub, shows a flair for singing too) and, to a lesser extent, the ambitious Samantha, all of the characters exhibit little but hopelessness, regret and resignation. Old Phil, for instance, goes about in a perpetual daze, barely lifting his eyelids and musing about death at every opportunity, and Penny is angry with the dismal rut into which her life has fallen. The younger generation seems even more pathetic, with as few prospects as their parents but more time for suffering. (Rachel is sweet, to be sure, but somehow that makes her plight all the more sad, especially when she’s propositioned by an old geezer who works beside her.)

As usual, Leigh is adept at capturing the desolation of life among members of the economic underclass in contemporary Britain (the gritty locations and plain photography help), and there are inevitably flashes of insight in his film. But overall the characters, perhaps because of their large number, never emerge as much more than sketches. Nor do many of the plot lines go very far. The Donna-Samantha-Jason triangle is left hanging, for instance, and Samantha’s encounter with her stalker is never resolved. Phil’s unhappiness plays out in one episode in which he goes off by himself to the shore, and in another during which he has a long conversation with a snooty Algerian fare (Diveen Henry), but neither sequence is particularly revelatory. In fact, in order to keep things moving at all, the writer-director and his cast make use of the most obvious melodramatic devices–a sudden heart attack, the announcement of a pregnancy–which would never have surfaced in his more astutely-constructed features. The final reel, moreover, which centers on one couple’s reconciliation and rediscovery of their love, becomes (despite excellent acting) more schmaltzy than Leigh’s norm; the message that even in lives of such misery, love and a certain crude happiness can triumph doesn’t quite ring true. You can sense that Leigh doesn’t quite buy it himself.

That’s not to say that there aren’t some good things on display here–Spall’s restrained turn and Sheen’s good-natured enthusiasm, most notably. (On the other hand, Bailey, Mays and Crompton offer little more than caricatures, and Coker and Hawkins aren’t far superior.) “All or Nothing” isn’t entirely fine or utterly poor, but it’s less than one might have expected from a filmmaker of Leigh’s past accomplishments.

C

The effect of institutional corruption on an idealistic young Catholic priest could be the subject of a compelling, if necessarily provocative, film if it were handled with some subtlety, but “The Crime of Father Amaro” exhibits the shallow sensationalism characteristic of soap opera; and by cramming into a mere two hours enough incident to fill a Spanish-language miniseries of “Thorn Birds” length, it winds up mawkish rather than moving, hectoring instead of instructive. Carlos Carrera’s film has become a boxoffice sensation in Mexico, but its success can be traced to the shocking subject matter rather than the quality of its treatment. It’s basically a modern variant of the sort of movies Otto Preminger was once so expert in concocting. They might not have been good films in any objective sense, but the hint of the scandalous attached to their plots usually attracted large audiences.

Based on an 1875 Portuguese novel but updated to a contemporary Mexican setting, the picture centers on the angelic-looking, recently-ordained Father Amaro (Gael Garcia Bernal), who’s on his way to take up his first post as assistant to Father Benito (Sancho Gracia), an old, established pastor of a parish in a modest provincial town. Amaro, it seems, is a favorite of the local bishop–among other things he was sent to study canon law in Rome–and the placement is designed to give him some practical experience preparatory to his returning to the episcopal see to become an important power in the diocese. His high-minded character is exhibited when the bus on which he’s traveling is ambushed by bandits, and he gives his own money to an old man who’s lost the nest egg with which he planned to open a shop. (Why he hadn’t been denuded of his cash too isn’t explained.) After his arrival, however, he finds the assignment fraught with difficulties. Father Benito proves to be collecting funds for a hospital secretly from the local drug lord, and when their cozy relationship is made public by a young journalist, Amaro is called on by the bishop to squelch the scandal by using the church’s influence to force the newspaper involved to print a false retraction. The young priest is also shocked by the pastor’s intimate relationship with a local restaurant owner, who also happens to serve as the parish housekeeper. Further trouble arises from the activity of Father Natalio (Damian Alcazar), a priest in a nearby parish who espouses liberation theology and has become friendly with local rebels; Amaro respects his passionate concern for the peasants, but must serve as the bishop’s instrument to force the rebellious man back into the fold or punish him. All of these difficulties fade into the background, however, when Amaro gets involved with beautiful young Amelia (Ana Claudia Talancon), the erstwhile girlfriend of the muckraking reporter who had exposed Father Benito’s dealings; before long the two are meeting clandestinely in the home of the parish sacristan (Amelia goes there supposedly to help the man’s mentally-challenged daughter), and their affair has the expectedly tragic, melodramatic outcome.

The overarching issue in “Father Amaro” is a potent one–how easily a young man can lose his innocence under pressure of his “professional” demands and his libido–but it requires careful, sensitive handling; and Carrera proves decidedly heavy-handed. The succession of seedy episodes almost becomes comical, and some of the secondary characters–most notably a strange, witch-like local woman named Dionisia, played to excess by Luisa Huerta–are more like caricatures. Bernal does a good job capturing the young priest’s hesitant manner, but he doesn’t succeed in bringing the figure’s varied motives into sharp relief; the fault may lie in the writing more than his acting, but the result is that the young man remains a fuzzy, indistinct creation– blankly handsome and emotionally opaque. The other performances are at best workmanlike, though Ernesto Gomez Cruz catches the easy worldliness of the local bishop.

“The Crime of Father Amaro” looks reasonably good, though it’s basically a spare, no-frills production. The problem isn’t so much with its body and with its soul. At heart the picture is more salacious telenovela than serious drama.