Another Year [68 points / 6 votes]
"Another Year is another wonderful film by the British director Mike Leigh, and it's tempting to take it for granted, as Leigh tends to release similarly wonderful films every few years. But this picture - which follows the lives of several unhappy misfits over the course of a year as they circle a settled, seemingly have-it-all couple that sort of functions as their social nucleus – has, at its center, a shocking, ineffable toughness; and it's this toughness that inspired some to write the picture off as being unpleasant for its own sake.
A less original director would've held the central couple played by Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen up as a beacon of understanding and compassion – the other players' oasis from their misery. But Broadbent's Tom and Sheen's Gerri are more discomforting creatures: somewhat enabling, somewhat judgmental, somewhat aloof. In another words, Tom and Gerri's troubled friends, a veritable island of lost toys most prominently represented by the lonely alcoholics Mary (Leslie Manville) and Ken (Peter Wight), are weighing themselves against a seemingly faraway contentment that's partially illusory -- they're so mired in their unhappiness that they miss the terror and resignation in Tom and Gerri's faces. For those who think Mannville went too far in her nearly amazing performance, I say: you're lucky if that pleading, embarrassing, yet oddly electric behavior strikes you as false due to lack of familiarity. I'm making the picture sound like a depressing dirge in the vein of misery porn such as last year's god-awful Jack Goes Boating, but Another Year is rich, contradictory and strangely exhilarating in its refusal to offer false, obliging hope; it's a bracing testament to our right to be unfulfilled, acknowledging that our existence is baffling and difficult but that we're in this together whether we know it or not. Another Year is the most beautiful and haunting picture I saw last year." - Chuck Bowen
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