Plot
Legendary filmmaker Mike Leigh returns to the contemporary world with a fierce, compassionate and often darkly humorous study of family and the delicate bonds that bind us. Reunited with Leigh for the first time since the multiple Oscar-nominated “Secrets and Lies,” the astonishing Marianne Jean-Baptiste plays Pansy, a woman wracked with anxiety, wracked by grief and prone to angry tirades against her husband, her son and anyone who looks. Her serene younger sister, played by Michele Austin (“Another Year”), is a single mother whose life is as different from Pansy’s as their contrasting temperaments — full of communal warmth from her salon clients and her daughters alike. This sprawling film from a master playwright takes us into the intensity of kinship, duty and that most enduring human mystery: that even in lifetimes filled with pain and hardship, we still find ways to love those we call family.