34/25
Scenario
Legendary filmmaker Mike Leigh returns to the modern world with a fierce, compassionate, and often darkly humorous exploration of family and the thorny bonds that bind us. For the first time since the Oscar-nominated Secrets and Lies, the stunning Marianne Jean-Baptiste plays Pansy, a fear-ridden woman plagued by grief and prone to furious tirades against her husband, son, and anyone who comes her way. Meanwhile, her gentle younger sister, played by Michele Austin (Another Year), is a single mother whose life is unlike Pansy’s in her own temperaments—filled with mutual warmth from salon clients and the like. This towering film from the master playwright takes us into the intensity of kinship, duty, and that most enduring of human mysteries: that even through pain and hardship, we still find ways to love those we call family.