Brassed Off is not the movie for which papers will laud Pete Postlethwaite in their obituaries of him, but it's a lovely, smart, musically and emotionally rich movie:
It's also one of the few movies in which Postlethwaite, best known as a character actor, was really one of the leads. It's a very, very British movie, but highly recommended even if you're not interested in Thatcherism's impact on coal-mining communities. Postlethwaite's death is a real loss to movies: he brought his roles an enormous amount of dignity, no matter the social class or situation of the characters he was playing. It's an all-too-rare quality in an age when lack of dignity defines both our comedy and our drama, and is seen as a sign of some kind of honesty or authenticity.