ANOTHER YEAR

Over the course of four seasons, ANOTHER YEAR explores the life of a sublimely happy older married couple, Tom (Jim Broadbent) and Gerri (Ruth Sheen), and their various friends and family members, in particular Mary (shatteringly crafted in a career-best performance from Lesley Manville) who struggle to find the happiness that Tom and Gerri have cultivated. Like Monet with another clump of water lilies, Mike Leigh presents another family-and-friends group portrait, a movie in which the distant sob or throb of sadness is never entirely absent. With its immersive sweetness and gentleness, this is among the best of the utterly confident and unhurried ensemble picture from Leigh, containing his distinctively extended dialogue scenes of unpointed ordinariness, and a lowered narrative heartbeat to which you have to make a conscious effort to adjust. The power of ANOTHER YEAR creeps up on you by stealth until it takes you over. It’s a deeply involving, intelligent, compassionate drama of the sort only Leigh can create.

"Make no mistake: ANOTHER YEAR is brilliant, heart-breaking, life-affirming and ceaselessly engrossing. It's as deeply felt and humane a work of cinema as anything by Zhang Yimou, Federico Fellini or Ingmar Bergman." - Jim Schembri