31/14
Legendary filmmaker Mike Leigh returns to the contemporary world with a passionate, compassionate and often darkly humorous study of family and the difficult bonds that bind us. The amazing Marianne Jean-Baptiste, reteaming with Leigh for the first time since the multiple Oscar-nominated Lies and Secrets, plays Pansy, a woman wracked with anxiety, tormented by suffering and prone to angry tirades against her husband, her son and anyone who looks her way. 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 – and who radiates warmth from both her salon clients and her daughters. 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.