Hard Truths

HARD TRUTHS

Exclusively at the Hyland NOW PLAYING!

BAFTA Nominated for Best British Film & Best Actress for Jean-Baptiste!

Legendary filmmaker Mike Leigh returns to the contemporary world with a fierce, compassionate, and often darkly humorous study of family and the thorny ties that bind us. Reunited with Leigh for the first time since multiple Oscar-nominated Secrets and Lies, the astonishing Marianne Jean-Baptiste plays Pansy, a woman wracked by fear, tormented by afflictions, and prone to raging tirades against her husband, son, and anyone who looks her way. Meanwhile, her easygoing younger sister, played by Michele Austin (Another Year), is a single mother with a life as different from Pansy's as their clashing temperaments -- brimming with communal warmth from her salon clients and daughters alike. This expansive film from a master dramatist takes us into the intensities of kinship, duty, and the most enduring of human mysteries: that even through lifetimes of hurt and hardship, we still find ways to love those we call family.

Hard Truths - Film Review

4 STARS - Glenn Kenny - rogerebert.com

"Leigh’s work often contains a political dimension; the one presented here is both highly sophisticated and not foregrounded. Consider that a white filmmaker has concocted a picture with maybe two white characters in it, and that the material fits him and his cast like a trusty old overcoat. This speaks not of any soft-hearted ilk of universal humanism, but an insistence on an integrity of circumstantial specificity. Or, ahem, what comic book movie fans call “world building.” The point being that the realm in which this film is set is, finally, one that concerns us all. The world is a problem, as the politically progressive musical group Henry Cow once put it." For the full review please CLICK HERE.