Writing for the Guardian, Philip French praises the Mike Leigh film:
Another Year appears to note some undefined malaise in the land, which a Ken Loach movie would certainly locate in the socioeconomic conditions of our time. But what we’re also seeing is the predicament of a post-second world war generation that lived through the age of austerity which shaped Leigh’s Vera Drake. These boys and girls born in the late 1940s and early 50s never expected to get middle-aged and then old the way their parents and grandparents did.
Now they’re facing disillusionment and mortality and we realise that Leigh’s title is a shorter version of the old phrase “Another year nearer the grave”. This is a subtle film, far less of a downer than it initially appears, though informed with a tragic sense of life. It rewards serious contemplation and, like all this director’s work, it seems to be catching life on the wing, when in fact it is as trained, controlled and graceful as a falcon.
I’ve read people write up this film, but somehow this captures it best, I think. Leigh’s masterful work should never be taken for granted because it feels improvisational. There is a hand at work here; Leigh very much knows what he wants to say.