Acclaimed filmmaker and playwright Mike Leigh returns to the contemporary world—after his prickly biopic Mr. Turner and his uprising epic Peterloo—with a fierce, compassionate, and often darkly humorous study of family and the thorny ties that bind us. Reunited with Leigh for the first time since multiple Oscar-nominated Secrets and Lies, the astonishing Marianne Jean-Baptiste plays Pansy, a woman wracked by fear, tormented by afflictions, and prone to raging tirades against her husband, son, and anyone who looks her way—recalling the hair-trigger main character of Leigh's masterpiece Naked but with a more relatable twist. Meanwhile, her easygoing younger sister (Michele Austin, Another Year), is a single mother with a life as different from Pansy’s as their clashing temperaments—brimming with communal warmth from her salon clients and daughters alike. This intimate film from a master dramatist takes us into the intensities of kinship, duty, and the most enduring of human mysteries: that even through lifetimes of hurt and hardship, we still find ways to love those we call family.
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