Another Year

Mike Leigh's Another Year opened in 2010 and earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay. Lesley Manville won Best Supporting Actress from the New York Film Critics Circle, and her absence from the Oscar nominations in her category was much lamented; we would put the performance among the finest supporting turns of its decade. The film completed the loose cycle of mature naturalism that Leigh had begun with Vera Drake and Happy-Go-Lucky.

It follows one calendar year, season by season, in the lives of Tom and Gerri (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen), a happily married middle-aged London couple at the centre of a circle of lonelier friends. The friend who matters most is Mary (Lesley Manville), Gerri's recently divorced colleague, whose visits to the house take up more and more of the film's attention. Her need for the warmth of Tom and Gerri's home, and her uncertain place inside it, is the film's central subject.

Leigh's working method (months of improvisation with the cast in pre-production, with characters built before any script exists) produces a film of unusual specificity. David Bradley appears as Tom's brother Ronnie. Manville does much of her work without dialogue, in the face and in the way Mary holds herself at a table full of other people's family, and it is among the most exact non-verbal performances in any of Leigh's films.