Matrixston Wow! Such a good movie.

Comwayon A Disappointing Continuation

Peereddi I was totally surprised at how great this film.You could feel your paranoia rise as the film went on and as you gradually learned the details of the real situation.

Bob This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

shootingstars-49590 The characters of Tom and Gerri are highly caricatured with an unbelievable life. The film suffers from having to have these two in almost every single scene. If they're not in the scene then their house is. Unlike many other old movie couples these two are not likable. The whole thing is unbelievable. I don't understand why critics keep referring to this movie as a classic.

dakjets This is a low-key but strong drama. We follow four seasons in the lives of the middle-aged married couple Tom and Gerri (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen), their 30-year-old bachelor son Joe and Gerri single colleague Mary (Lesley Manville). A collection meetings and small events showing Leigh's ability to transform the everyday life into something meaningful. The film's strength is in my opinion the strong person characters and the dialogues between the characters. The interpersonal stands in the center, and the film is about the important things in life such as friendship, happiness and having a meaningful life. This film was both touching and engaging. The story allows us to follows a handful of people and their lives through one year. We get to know the main characters, and can take part in their lives, for better or worse. A great movie experience of everyday life and every day people. This film is a winner!

paul2001sw-1 Mike Leigh's 'Another Year' at first feels like a very smug movie: a likable, affluent couple pass their time together over the course of a year, often in the company of variously inadequate friends who alternately entertain them and require their support. Eventually, a drama emerges from the growing stresses of one of these relationships; but it's a very well-signalled development. What makes the film a success is the sheer skill with which director and cast pull off the individual encounters: Leigh famously prepares for writing the final drafts of his scripts through improvisation, and this film in particular feels like an assembly of scenes emerging from a workshop, but there's no denying they're beautifully done, drawing you into the misery of the characters even where you knew exactly what was coming. And gradually, the film's perspective shifts from that of the insiders (whose compassion is increasing revealed as finite) to that of the outsiders. The abrupt ending offers no promises of happiness to those who didn't have it already when the movie began.

ciao-tom Is Mike Leigh trying to be Ingmar Bergman? Always the same actors, the same sorts of intimate human dramas. In this particular case we have a really smug, settled, very English couple (Tom and Geri) who work as a team, exchanging glances, out to spot any potentially unsettling situation and level it off (usually with yet another cup of tea). The woman of the couple (Geri) is a psychotherapist but completely unable to handle the desperation of her co-worker Mary, a stereotyped "desperate woman" (hopelessly over-acted by Lesley Manville) who is going mad simply because she can't find the right man. Surely this is a very dubious way to portray a woman who has difficulties with men? Tom and Geri are completely unable to deal with her and end up just shutting her out of their lives.I don't know if it's intentional or not but this film depicts all the horror of middle- class English life: cold and uncommunicative people who only seem nice but are really nasty to one another underneath, horrified at the slightest manifestation of emotion (be it love or anger), always wanting to dilute every experience and take the sting out of every situation.The idea of the "year" is supposed to be conveyed by the four seasons, depicted as the four seasons in the allottment tended by Tom and Geri. Another Bergman-ish touch.There's a brilliant cameo piece right at the beginning, in which the great Imelda Staunton plays one of Geri's patients, desperate to get some Valium from the doctor, very tense and loaded with problems she doesn't want to admit to. Staunton's ability to play this role, very close-up to the camera where you can see every nuance of her facial muscles, her frightened, suspicious eyes, her tight mouth. The immense abilities of this great actress only make Lesley Manville's portrayal of the "Anne" seem all the more hopelessly inadequate.The film has a number of discontinuities: since Anne and Geri work closely together every day, what happens at work when Geri decides to "unfriend" Anne? We're not told.Some of the really interesting characters (Tom and Geris' son Joe, played by the excellent Oliver Maltman, whose totally laid-back attitude is a foil to the absurdly keyed-up Anne; Tom's angry nephew Carl, played by Martin Savage - perhaps the only real hope in the film) never really develop.Disappointing. It's clear that Mike Leigh had something interesting he wanted to say with the film - something critical about English society- but he slips into making it a soft-focus poem about the happy, basically stupid life of Tom and Geri with their allottment and their cups of tea. Very disappointing and quite difficult to watch.