Reviews

Nothing really happens in Mike Leigh's latest, "Another Year" -- nothing extraordinary, at least. As the title suggests, the film follows the usual comings and goings, ups and downs that transpire over four seasons among a longtime happily married couple, their family and friends.

And yet everything is fully realized and superbly crafted; the sense of intimacy Leigh creates as writer and director is never broken, for better and for worse. "Another Year" feels as organic and authentic as the vegetables its lead characters, husband and wife Tom and Gerri (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen), grow in a community garden. It reveals the players' connections effortlessly, and with the naturalistic dialogue that is among the filmmaker's trademarks. But it can also be unrelentingly bleak, which should come as a surprise to absolutely no one who's a fan of Leigh's work.

By Christy Lemire, from The Associated Press (AP)

In fact, the most interesting aspect of Another Year is its slow, subtle shift in perspective. We start out watching Mary behave awfully through the eyes of Gerri and Tom, whose smugness is equally awful (they're such a unit that to get passive-aggressive, they both have to chip in -- Gerri's judgment is passive, Tom's aggressive). But by the film's final scene, as an unchanged Tom and Gerri finish one another's sentences when telling an insufferable story about the time they traveled all over the world "and didn't even have to do it cheaply," we're seeing the scene from the point of view of Mary, who -- though humbled by a year's worth of disappointment and defeat to the point of being physically depleted -- is still totally awful, a needy drunk whose self-pity sends out stink waves. I haven't seen a film this year that so openly invited me to revile each and every one of its characters -- and I reviewed The Human Centipede.

By Karina Longworth, from The Village Voice