Screen/Society--"Hard Truths" (Mike Leigh, 2024)

HARD TRUTHS
(Mike Leigh, 2024, 97 min, USA, English, DCP)

Legendary filmmaker Mike Leigh returns 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. 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 clashing temperaments - brimming with communal warmth from her salon clients and daughters alike. This expansive 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.

-- Marianne Jean-Baptiste Best Actress winner at NYFCC (New York Film Critics Circle), Los Angeles Film Critics Association (LAFCA) and National Society of Film Critics (NSFC), becoming the first woman of color to do so.

"For the past half century, [Mike Leigh] has been making movies that, when they're not making you gasp with laughter, take the wind out of you as quickly as a gut punch." - Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

"I love you," Chantelle tells her. "I don't understand you, but I love you." It's a message that Leigh has been trying to convey to his characters for more than 40 years, and one that has seldom been so natural to accept for ourselves." - David Ehrlich, IndieWire