- Critic Score
- Most active
- Publication
- Most clicked
-
100Extracting big drama out of small events is Mike Leigh's forte, and with his latest little masterpiece, Another Year, the English director pushes himself to the extreme.
-
100Leigh's Another Year is like a long, purifying soak in empathy.
-
100What it does have is an overwhelming bittersweet melancholy at the passing of life from middle age into…well, you could call it late middle age.
-
100A quintessential Mike Leigh performance. It deepens as it goes along until, in the end, in its final close-up, it overwhelms.
-
100Getting a small cohort of humanity dead right is an impressive artistic achievement, but Mike Leigh's beautifully modulated English drama Another Year advances even farther.
-
100Measured in pace, yet thoroughly gripping and completely accessible. The title soft-sells the picture, but it's among the best of this or any year. And Manville should clear some shelf space for well-deserved awards.
-
100These characters are more than what we see on the surface, and it's thanks to Leigh's rigorous yet generous eye that we never just gawk at the drama.
-
91The performances are winning, the story is surprising without relying on unlikely twists, and the relationships are the richest and most nuanced since Leigh's "Secrets & Lies."
-
90The acting is uniformly terrific, just a marvel to watch.
-
88You may not realize the imprint it has left until its last season comes to a close.
-
88This humane movie is an ode to joy, albeit of the mature sort.
-
88A script that deftly fleshes out characters and mimics reality shockingly well.
-
88It all comes down to affirmation vs. denial. Leigh chooses affirmation. And the result is life-affirming.
-
88Like "Life Is Sweet," "Secrets & Lies," and yes, 1971's "Bleak Moments," to name but three of Leigh's 10 semi-improvised character studies, Another Year is another frowning comedy.
-
88Love and loneliness are presented, in almost equal parts, with subdued precision in the richly abundant Another Year.
-
88Just watch the magnificent Manville, in a raw and riveting award-class performance that exposes a grieving heart under siege. Her last scene is quietly devastating. So is this intimate miracle of a movie.
-
85It's as subversive and penetrating a treatment of the British character as we get on the big screen, and it's why I don't mind that Leigh keeps them coming 'round with the reliability of the cocktail hour.
-
83Very good Leigh -- maybe even, given Manville's heroic work, great Leigh.
-
80A brief but piercing cameo by Imelda Staunton (Vera Drake), as a desolate old woman who fiercely rejects professional counseling for depression, drives home Leigh's greatest insight, that true happiness is not found but realized.
-
80The perfect haven from the cheap ironies and cruel indifference we all have to field both in life and, far too often, at the movies.
-
80It may sound commonplace, but in the hands of master filmmaker Mike Leigh, the everyday becomes extraordinary.
-
80Splendidly rich and wise.
-
80Mike Leigh has a knack of making the ordinary extraordinary. Here he deals with themes of class, family and depression over a period of a year, breaking it up into seasonal chapters.
-
80Another year, another Mike Leigh gem.
-
75I'm not sure there's anything else to take away from this film besides Manville's performance and gratitude that we aren't these people.
-
75In Mary, Leigh has found the polar opposite of Sally Hawkin's giggle-through-the-pain heroine of "Happy-Go-Lucky."
-
75Another Year allows viewers to occupy both psychic spaces, nesting into the warm comforts of a long-lived-in home and then, on a dime, seeing it through the searching eyes of the marginalized figures that, over the course of 11 films, Leigh has so often championed.
-
75A gutsy movie, in that Leigh says something about life that nobody really wants to believe, and he says it forcefully: There is such a thing as "too late."
-
75For all the warmth emanating from the film's core, thanks to Broadbent and Sheen, I don't know if Leigh has ever made a crueler picture.
-
75Another Year is a stacked deck of a movie that draws a harshly unforgiving, sometimes smug line between boomers who've made good and those who've fallen by the wayside.
-
60Mike Leigh's latest film preserves the mystery of why another marriage has flourished over decades. That's not the stated subject of Another Year, but it's at the center of this enjoyable though insistently schematic comedy.
-
50Many scenes, like Another Year itself, don't actually go anywhere.
-
50I know that we are meant to be drawn into the undergrowth of these ordinary lives, and the long tale is neatly split into four symbolic seasons;...But do they and their fellow-Brits honestly swell the heart, or do they grate, exasperate, and finally grind us down?
-
50Acutely observed but gloomy and lacking narrative, it tells of 12 months in the life of a decent but dull suburban couple and their friends, most of whom you would go out of your way to avoid at a party.
-
Dec 28, 20100I 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."