19/24
Synopsis
Legendary filmmaker Mike Leigh returns to the contemporary world with a fierce, compassionate and often darkly humorous study of family and the thorny bonds that bind us together. Reuniting with Leigh for the first time since the Oscar-nominated Secrets and Lies, the stunning Marianne Jean-Baptiste plays Pansy, a woman ravaged by fear, tormented by afflictions and prone to rabid tirades against her husband, her son and anyone who looks at him in her own way. Meanwhile, her laid-back younger sister, played by Michele Austin (Another Year), is a single mother with a life as different from Pansy’s as their conflicting temperaments – brimming with communal warmth from her salon clients and her daughters. This expansive film from a master playwright takes us into the intensity of kinship, duty and the most enduring of human mysteries: Even through lives of pain and hardship, we always find ways to love those we call family.