Hard Truths

Reunited with Mike 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 itself is astonishingly sensitive for a portrait of someone who often behaves monstrously. Leigh depicts Pansy’s journey with a wrenching empathy, carefully revealing how her irascibility is caused by burdens both specific and mundane.

Shirley Li, The Atlantic

Arriving nearly three decades after Secrets & Lies, Hard Truths has the feel of a genuine companion work. Intentionally or not, it expands on, completes, and at times challenges its predecessor.

Justin Chang, The New Yorker

Hard Truths is a film for a world that has only gotten angrier, yet its prolific central collaboration cleverly suggests that enduring mutual respect is a force powerful enough to combat such profound rage.

Coleman Spilde, Salon.com