44/38
Legendary filmmaker Mike Leigh returns to the present with a passionate, compassionate and often darkly humorous study of family and the thorny ties that bind us. The astonishing Marianne Jean-Baptiste, reuniting with Leigh for the first time since the multiple Oscar-nominated Lies and Secrets, plays Pansy, a woman wracked with anxiety and tormented by suffering, prone to angry tirades against her husband, son and anyone who looks at her. Meanwhile, her composed younger sister, played by Michele Austin (Another Year), is a single mother whose life is as different from Pansy’s as their differing temperaments – she brims with communal warmth from her salon clients and daughters alike. This sweeping film from a master playwright introduces us to the intensity of kinship, duty, and that most enduring of human mysteries: that even in lives filled with pain and hardship, we can still find ways to love those we call family.