Career Girls (1997)

Brilliant comedy-drama written and directed by Mike Leigh. It tells the story of two student friends, played by Katrin Cartlidge and Lynda Steadman, who reunite after six years apart. 

They are complex characters, and the actors give astonishingly vivid performances to bring them to life. There’s so much twitchy energy when they’re on screen together that you don’t know where to look.

It would have been a masterpiece except for some plot problems. The pair keep bumping into people they knew years ago. This just doesn’t happen in a city as large as London. And for a story grounded in social realism, three major coincidences is two too many.