19/45
Narrative
Legendary director Mike Leigh returns to the contemporary world with a fierce, compassionate, and often humorous study of family and the thorny bonds that bind us. Reuniting with Leigh for the first time since her Oscar-nominated Secrets and Lies, the stunning Marianne Jean-Baptiste stars as Pansy, a fear-ridden woman plagued by grief and prone to furious tirades against her husband, son, and anyone who looks her way. Meanwhile, her quiet younger sister, played by Michele Austin (Another Year), is a single mother with a life as different from Pansy’s as their conflicting temperaments – filled with shared warmth from her salon clients and daughters alike. This expansive film by a master playwright takes us into the intensity of kinship, duty, and that most enduring of human mysteries: that even through lives of suffering and hardship, we still find ways to love those we call family.