Hard Truths
Ongoing exploration of the contemporary world with a tragicomic study of human strengths and weaknesses. (R, 97 min.)
Showtimes
Friday, January 10, 2025
(TBD)
Legendary filmmaker Mike Leigh returns to the contemporary world 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. [Bleecker Street]
Starring: Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Samantha Spiro, Ruby Bentall
Director: Mike Leigh
Genre: Comedy, Drama
"It's one of the very few great films of 2024."
— Glenn Kenny, RogerEbert.com
"Jean-Baptiste is breathtakingly good, and it’s so nice to have Leigh back on the dramatic scene. He’s essential to it."
— Brian Tallerico, RogerEbert.com
"A brilliant character-driven story that gives Marianne Jean-Baptiste room to create an Oscar-caliber portrayal of an unforgettable wretch."
— Dwight Brown, DwightBrownInk.com
"A vivid, superbly acted and directed portrait of psychic pain and its collateral wreckage, filled out with lashes of humor and tiny brush strokes of tenderness."
— Jon Frosch, The Hollywood Reporter
"Leigh's strategy of taking us into his characters' world without prelude or explanation, letting the revelations and backstory waft out, help make his films feel authentic."
— Caryn James, BBC.com
"What a joy it is to be back in Leigh’s London after such a long absence – to see it from new angles, made accessible to his loving gaze by a cast of fresh collaborators."
— Mark Asch, Little White Lies
"It’s a film of deep empathy, but a tough one, too. Leigh and his collaborators don’t have any easy answers as to why Pansy is this way, or if she’ll ever be different. What they leave us with is a character who’s richly and roundly drawn."
— Dave Calhoun, Time Out
"Following his hugely ambitious period productions Mr Turner and Peterloo, the director returns to what might be considered the quintessential Leigh mode of tightly-framed domestic drama, and does so with exceptional bite."
— Jonathan Romney, Screen International
"In Mike Leigh’s lacerating new film, Marianne Jean-Baptiste delivers a hall-of-fame acting triumph as a London housewife and mother who’s mad at the world and ready to give us all a tongue-lashing. She’s an emotional powderkeg ready to blow. Better duck"
— Peter Travers, ABC News
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