11/50
Legendary director Mike Leigh returns to the modern world with a fierce, compassionate, and often dark sense of humor to explore family and the thorny bonds that bind us. Reuniting with Leigh for the first time since the multiple Oscar-nominated Secrets and Lies, the beautiful Marianne Jean-Baptiste stars as Pansy, a timid, tormented woman prone to furious tirades against her husband, son, and anyone who gets in her way. Meanwhile, her quiet younger sister, played by Michele Austin (Next Year), is a single mother whose life is as different from Pansy’s as their clashing temperaments – filled with the mutual warmth of salon clients and daughters. This sweeping film from a master playwright transports us to the intensity of kinship, duty, and the most enduring of human mysteries: even through a life of pain and hardship, we still find ways to love those we call family.