47/40

Legendary director Mike Leigh returns to the modern world with a fierce, compassionate, and often darkly humorous examination of family and the thorny bonds that bind us together. Reunited with Leigh for the first time since the Oscar-nominated Secrets and Lies, the astonishing Marianne Jean-Baptiste plays Pansy, a woman racked by fear, tormented by suffering, and given to furious tirades against her husband, son, and anyone who looks her way. Meanwhile, her easygoing younger sister, played by Michele Austin (Another Year), is a single mother with a life as different from Pansy’s as their conflicting temperaments—one filled with the warmth of community from both her salon clients and her daughters. This sweeping film from a master dramatist takes us into the intensity of kinship, duty, and that most enduring of human mysteries: that even through a lifetime of pain and hardship, we still find ways to love those we call family.