Another Year (2010)

Few filmmakers portray life as real as Mike Leigh, and “Another Year” feels not so much like a movie, but an invite to stay with the family who’s at the center of this drama. Ruth Sheen and Jim Broadbent play a married couple, perfectly content with gardening, eating and reading in bed. She’s a counselor. He’s a geologist. They invites family and friends to a handful of dinners during the course of a year, including a divorcee (Lesley Manville) crumbling under loneliness who gulps wine as if it is an antidote, and an equally lonely old school chum (Oliver Maltman) who holds onto wine bottles as if they were oxygen. Alcohol equals life in this film. The main couple enjoys it as a side to the wonderful dishes they whip up. Take it or leave it. Manville and Maltman are full-fledged alcoholics, drowning their miseries in wine and all the more miserable for it. There’s not a false word, performance or scene in this drama that lays bare the jealousy that the miserable feel toward the happy. Manville should have won an Oscar. Fact. A