Now that Mike Leigh’s Another Year is at last opening to the public, it is getting its first taste of reviews from mainstream critics. The time between Cannes and now has been long. But Leigh’s meticulous work and Lesley Manville’s performance continue to stand out.
From the LA Times’ Kenneth Turan:
The film starts with spring, which provides an intense look at Mary when she comes to Tom and Gerri’s for dinner. Within the context of a single evening, Manville’s superlative acting unself-consciously peels Mary like an onion, revealing her as someone alternately in denial and despair about the unhappiness in her life, uncomfortable in her own skin but unwilling or unable to do anything about it but drink too much too often.
AO Scott, from the NY Times:
Class consciousness has frequently played a role in Mike Leigh’s films, and not only because, as a storyteller whose native terrain is modern Britain, he can hardly hope to avoid it. And sure enough, the observant viewer of his splendidly rich and wise new feature, “Another Year,” will notice the shadows that an always-evolving system of social hierarchy casts over the passage of the seasons. (“We’re all graduates,” one character reminds another, with the prickly pride of belonging to the first generation to receive a university education in an era of expanded opportunity.)
And on Lesley Manville:
The film’s more complicated and sustained contrast is between Gerri and Mary, her co-worker and longtime friend, played by Lesley Manville with the kind of wrenching, borderline-unbearable lack of self-protective actorly vanity that reminds you that, however gentle it may seem, this is still a Mike Leigh film. In other words, the spectacle of humiliation that takes place when uncomfortable self-consciousness turns into its opposite is never far away. Such mortal embarrassment stalks Mary, who is needy, insecure and prone to drink too much, and also Ken (Peter Wight), an old chum of Tom’s who packs the same traits into a large, shambling masculine frame.