Another Year

Mike Leigh's Another Year opened in 2010 and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Lesley Manville won Best Supporting Actress at the New York Film Critics Circle and was widely considered to have been overlooked for the Oscar in her category — a performance now regularly cited as one of the great supporting-actress turns of its decade. The film completed Leigh's loose mature-naturalism cycle that had begun with Vera Drake and Happy-Go-Lucky.

The film is structured across the four seasons of one calendar year in the lives of Tom and Gerri (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen), a happily married middle-aged London couple who serve as the gravitational centre for a circle of lonelier friends. Mary (Lesley Manville), Gerri's recently divorced colleague, is the friend whose visits the film turns most attention to; her gradual, unhappy understanding of where she stands within the warmth of Tom and Gerri's home is the film's central subject.

Leigh's working method — extensive improvisation with the cast across months of pre-production, character development before script — produced a film of unusual specificity. David Bradley appears as Tom's brother Ronnie. Manville's closing tableau — silent at the dinner table, surrounded by a family that is not hers — is among the most exact non-verbal performances in any of Leigh's films.