Narrative
Legendary filmmaker Mike Leigh returns to the contemporary world with a fierce, compassionate and often darkly humorous study of family and the thorny bonds that bind us together. Reuniting with Leigh for the first time since the Oscar-nominated Secrets & Lies, the wonderful Marianne Jean-Baptiste plays Pansy, a woman wracked with fear, wracked with grief and prone to furious tirades against her husband, her son and anyone else in sight. 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 contrasting temperaments – filled with the mutual warmth of her salon clients and the like. This sweeping film from a master playwright draws us into the depths of kinship, duty and that most enduring of human mysteries: even in lives of pain and hardship, we still find ways to love those we call family.