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Special Features
Commentary with Director Mike Leigh & Actress Lesley Manville
The Making of Another Year
The Mike Leigh Method
The Making of Another Year
The Mike Leigh Method
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Director Mike Leigh's gift for finding rich drama and humor in ordinary human lives remains as strong as ever in Another Year. Plot is almost nonexistent: Tom and Gerri (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen), a happy and settled couple, both support and try to fend off the neediness of their less fortunate friends--particularly Mary (Lesley Manville), whose fantasies of romance with Tom and Gerri's son Joe (Oliver Maltman) come crashing down when Joe brings home his new girlfriend Katie (Karina Fernandez). Leigh's ability to draw astoundingly fully realized performances from his superb casts can turn a simple bit of anxious flirting into nerve-wracking comedy, or make the audience feel the cruel sting of a sudden disappointment. Manville (who's appeared in previous Leigh movies, as has most of the cast) turns in a remarkably alive performance, making Mary's yearning and fears almost uncomfortably vivid--but everyone in the cast is thoroughly natural, with the ever-dependable Broadbent (familiar from Moulin Rouge and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince) and Sheen anchoring the film with a quiet, confident affection. Another Year is a gentle addition to Leigh's oeuvre; it doesn't have the head-to-head conflict of Secrets and Lies or the musical fervor of Topsy-Turvy. This movie's emotions are more rueful and reflective, pondering the nature of contentment. Much as Happy-Go-Lucky questioned the essence of cheerfulness, Another Year asks, What makes one person able to find love, while another flounders? Not a common topic for a movie, but Mike Leigh is not a common filmmaker. --Bret Fetzer
Product Description
From seven-time Oscar nominee Mike Leigh comes this critically acclaimed slice of life starring Academy Award winner Jim Broadbent (Best Supporting Actor, Iris, 2001), Lesley Manville and Ruth Sheen. A happy couple for over thirty years, Tom (Broadbent) and Gerri (Sheen) act as a steady anchor to their unmarried circle of family and friends. But as the seasons change and another year passes, Tom and Gerri’s support is put to the test in this masterful look at life, love and the meaning of friendship.
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
28 of 30 people found the following review helpful
Format:Blu-ray
Tom is a geologist, at the start of the film, checking drill core to ensure strong foundations for coming construction. Gerry is a medical counselor, gently attempting to help her clients tend to their lives. Both are gardeners who know that you can have almost anything you want, provided you plant the seeds and take the time to tend and direct their growth. Their reward is shared time together and a bountiful harvest freely shared with others.
Mary, a middle-aged secretary at Gerry's office, knows none of this.
She repeatedly comments on Tom and Gerry's "luck" but is clueless about its source. She has no interest in others beyond finding the perfect man who will love her and even cook for her. She doesn't cook for herself or others (replacing food with alcohol)and besides, it's so much easier to go home to Tom and Gerry's where she is cared for. She even imagines a romantic relationship with their son, half her age, who she used to babysit, and is shattered (and unspeakably rude) when he brings his girlfriend home to meet the parents.
She buys a wreck of a car imagining that it will make her even more free from responsibility (in this case, train schedules) but has no clue how to care for it or even what its needs might be. At a garden party, where she imagines her mechanical difficulties to be the main topic of interest, she completely fails to notice a co-worker's new baby.
Yes, Mary is unlucky, much like the profoundly depressed insomniac woman at the very beginning of the movie -- who has only two brief appearances. So why is SHE there? Because in another year or two or three, that will be Mary. She is the harvest.
There are no entertaining shoot outs or car chases here, and the only monsters are real ones. This is a quiet meditation on real life, the foundations and the seeds and patterns of growing and dying that we put in place through our own choices and desires and their consequences. Sadly and beautifully and brilliantly done.
Mary, a middle-aged secretary at Gerry's office, knows none of this.
She repeatedly comments on Tom and Gerry's "luck" but is clueless about its source. She has no interest in others beyond finding the perfect man who will love her and even cook for her. She doesn't cook for herself or others (replacing food with alcohol)and besides, it's so much easier to go home to Tom and Gerry's where she is cared for. She even imagines a romantic relationship with their son, half her age, who she used to babysit, and is shattered (and unspeakably rude) when he brings his girlfriend home to meet the parents.
She buys a wreck of a car imagining that it will make her even more free from responsibility (in this case, train schedules) but has no clue how to care for it or even what its needs might be. At a garden party, where she imagines her mechanical difficulties to be the main topic of interest, she completely fails to notice a co-worker's new baby.
Yes, Mary is unlucky, much like the profoundly depressed insomniac woman at the very beginning of the movie -- who has only two brief appearances. So why is SHE there? Because in another year or two or three, that will be Mary. She is the harvest.
There are no entertaining shoot outs or car chases here, and the only monsters are real ones. This is a quiet meditation on real life, the foundations and the seeds and patterns of growing and dying that we put in place through our own choices and desires and their consequences. Sadly and beautifully and brilliantly done.
14 of 16 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Another funny, perceptive, moving human drama by Leigh at his best.
January 4, 2011
By tois
Format:Blu-ray
Life isn't sweet for the characters of Mike Leigh's new film, and it's not happy-go-lucky either.
"Another Year" is, in short, another Leigh film about normal folk living ordinary lives. And yet, of course, it's about so much more.
It's about an allotment for one thing - a small parcel of land lovingly tended by geologist Tom (Jim Broadbent) and his medical counsellor wife Gerri (Ruth Sheen).
It's also about a car: a dysfunctional little runaround that Gerri's lonely, wineslugging co-worker Mary (Lesley Manville) buys in the futile expectation it will open up new horizons.
It's about Tom's chum Ken (Peter Wight), a boozy, overweight sadsack. It's also about Tom's older brother Ronnie (David Bradley) and their respective sons: one a wry community lawyer (Oliver Maltman), the other an angry, volatile malcontent (Martin Savage).
Family and friends, children and parents, siblings and colleagues. Split into four parts, each one focused on a different season, Another Year has a formal, Eric Rohmer-esque structure that makes it one of its creator's most ordered works.
Yet the middle-class suburban milieu it shows is anything but, the lottery of humanity having blessed Tom and Gerri with married contentment and saddled the likes of Mary, Ken and Janet (a despondent patient of Gerri's, memorably played by Imelda Staunton) with disappointment and misery. Why do some luck out and others miss out?
You won't find an answer to that conundrum in Year. But you do see what happens when the two collide, Mary's inappropriate crush on Maltman's jovial Joe coming a cropper when he arrives for tea with a perky girlfriend (Karina Fernandez) half her age.
Manville is teriffic here, her pinched mouth and teary eyes conveying the anguish of a woman who's just had her last illusion shattered. Yet so too is Sheen, her benevolent compassion turning steely at the merest hint of her brood being threatened.
Throw in Broadbent's chipper, gently mocking patriarch and you have three of the finest performances ever to grace a Mike Leigh yarn. No mean feat from the man who gave us Naked, Vera Drake and Secrets & Lies.
Meantime, long-term Leigh collaborator, cinematographer Dick Pope, elegantly transports us from spring through to winter with a such graceful fluidity that one easily forgives the film's occasional longueur.
Leigh's take on life's rich tapestry - its smiles, its frowns, its ups and downs - is second nature to us now. Yet he's still made Another funny, perceptive, moving human drama. Neil Smith
Secrets and Lies
Naked - Criterion Collection
Career Girls
Happy-Go-Lucky
All Or Nothing (2002)
Vera Drake
"Another Year" is, in short, another Leigh film about normal folk living ordinary lives. And yet, of course, it's about so much more.
It's about an allotment for one thing - a small parcel of land lovingly tended by geologist Tom (Jim Broadbent) and his medical counsellor wife Gerri (Ruth Sheen).
It's also about a car: a dysfunctional little runaround that Gerri's lonely, wineslugging co-worker Mary (Lesley Manville) buys in the futile expectation it will open up new horizons.
It's about Tom's chum Ken (Peter Wight), a boozy, overweight sadsack. It's also about Tom's older brother Ronnie (David Bradley) and their respective sons: one a wry community lawyer (Oliver Maltman), the other an angry, volatile malcontent (Martin Savage).
Family and friends, children and parents, siblings and colleagues. Split into four parts, each one focused on a different season, Another Year has a formal, Eric Rohmer-esque structure that makes it one of its creator's most ordered works.
Yet the middle-class suburban milieu it shows is anything but, the lottery of humanity having blessed Tom and Gerri with married contentment and saddled the likes of Mary, Ken and Janet (a despondent patient of Gerri's, memorably played by Imelda Staunton) with disappointment and misery. Why do some luck out and others miss out?
You won't find an answer to that conundrum in Year. But you do see what happens when the two collide, Mary's inappropriate crush on Maltman's jovial Joe coming a cropper when he arrives for tea with a perky girlfriend (Karina Fernandez) half her age.
Manville is teriffic here, her pinched mouth and teary eyes conveying the anguish of a woman who's just had her last illusion shattered. Yet so too is Sheen, her benevolent compassion turning steely at the merest hint of her brood being threatened.
Throw in Broadbent's chipper, gently mocking patriarch and you have three of the finest performances ever to grace a Mike Leigh yarn. No mean feat from the man who gave us Naked, Vera Drake and Secrets & Lies.
Meantime, long-term Leigh collaborator, cinematographer Dick Pope, elegantly transports us from spring through to winter with a such graceful fluidity that one easily forgives the film's occasional longueur.
Leigh's take on life's rich tapestry - its smiles, its frowns, its ups and downs - is second nature to us now. Yet he's still made Another funny, perceptive, moving human drama. Neil Smith
Secrets and Lies
Naked - Criterion Collection
Career Girls
Happy-Go-Lucky
All Or Nothing (2002)
Vera Drake
18 of 22 people found the following review helpful
Format:Blu-ray
If "Another Year" comes off as unsatisfying, perhaps that's a testament to director Mike Leigh's affinity for depicting real life as it naturally unfolds. The movie doesn't have much of a plot, but it does have a strong sense of character, believable dialogue, and a definite theme, namely that life simply goes on. It's about ordinary people with ordinary problems; they may initially seem otherworldly, but they become more real as the film progresses, and by the end, we feel as if we've known them for years. This isn't to suggest that we automatically like all of them. You can understand a person and still think they're better suited in someone else's company. The film doesn't offer a lot in the way of resolution, but then again, neither does life, so I guess there's no sense in complaining.
Taking place in England, the center of the story is Tom and Gerri (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen), and before you ask, yes, they get the occasional joke about how their names are pared. They're in their autumn years and have been married a long time. They're perfectly content; Tom is an engineering geologist, Gerri is a counselor, and after some years of travelling, the two now enjoy gardening and harvesting vegetables. Their thirty-year-old son, Joe (Oliver Maltman), hasn't yet found a girlfriend but is about as content as his parents. They address each other simply and don't seem to have any issues with one another. We follow them through the course of four seasons as they interact with friends and family, who all seem to suffer from some degree of unhappiness.
The most prominent is Gerri's coworker, Mary (Lesley Manville). At first, she's a comical figure, a woman who can't seem to stop talking and always nurses a glass of wine. With every passing scene, she becomes more and more tragic until we realize that she's a desperately lonely alcoholic in serious need of professional help. She has known Joe since he was ten, and now that he's a man, she finds that she's incredibly attracted to him. He doesn't feel the same way, but he never avoids her; in fact, there are times when he makes it a point to have a conversation with her. And, when he finally does get a girlfriend, he isn't afraid to introduce her to Mary, who, as you can probably guess, is crushed. She realizes that she wasn't ready for her first marriage. She finally fell in love in her thirties, but it was to a man who ultimately divorced her and left her with nothing. At this advanced stage in her life, she just wants someone to talk to.
Mary's life is symbolized by a used car she purchased with what little money she had stashed away. We never see it fall to pieces, but there are a couple of densely worded scenes in which she rants about the mechanical problems, the break-ins, and the financial woes they entail. She's a terrible driver and gets lost quite easily, even on routes she has successfully walked many times. She relies a little too often on take-away food, since she's not much of a cook and hasn't dated anyone who would take that responsibility. She says in an early scene that she's happy to be independent, but the fact is, she wants to be taken care of. Gerri addresses her just as simply as she does her husband; if she considers Mary a friend, then I find it peculiar she didn't make more of an effort to get her help. She is, after all, a counselor.
Other characters are introduced. Some are written out much sooner than we'd expect them to be, begging the question of why they were included in the first place. Consider Tom's friend, Ken (Peter Wight), who's aging, overweight, a smoker, a drinker, and being dragged into retirement kicking and screaming. He realizes, with depressing clarity, that he doesn't want to take the train back home, for there's absolutely nothing there waiting for him. He's attracted to Mary. She most certainly doesn't feel the same way about him. The most curious character is Janet (Imelda Staunton), who appears in exactly two scenes as a clinically depressed insomniac unwilling to partake in Gerri's counseling. When the film was over, I was certain that nothing would have been lost had this character been eliminated.
A more substantial but equally subdued subplot is introduced later in the film, when Tom attends the funeral of his sister-in-law and invites his brother, Ronnie (David Bradley), to stay with him for a couple of days. Ronnie's son, Carl (Martin Savage), is an undependable hothead who I suspect was that way long before the death of his mother. Ronnie and Mary eventually have a conversation, although Mary does most of the talking. Is this her story? It might seem that way, especially since she's the subject of the final shot. Still, I have a feeling that "Another Year" isn't anyone's story in particular. Friends come and go. Families get together and separate. People live, people die - seasons change. I grant you that this isn't a particularly fulfilling message. But this is a movie about the mundane, about still frames in people's lives. You see this movie, and then you move on.
Taking place in England, the center of the story is Tom and Gerri (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen), and before you ask, yes, they get the occasional joke about how their names are pared. They're in their autumn years and have been married a long time. They're perfectly content; Tom is an engineering geologist, Gerri is a counselor, and after some years of travelling, the two now enjoy gardening and harvesting vegetables. Their thirty-year-old son, Joe (Oliver Maltman), hasn't yet found a girlfriend but is about as content as his parents. They address each other simply and don't seem to have any issues with one another. We follow them through the course of four seasons as they interact with friends and family, who all seem to suffer from some degree of unhappiness.
The most prominent is Gerri's coworker, Mary (Lesley Manville). At first, she's a comical figure, a woman who can't seem to stop talking and always nurses a glass of wine. With every passing scene, she becomes more and more tragic until we realize that she's a desperately lonely alcoholic in serious need of professional help. She has known Joe since he was ten, and now that he's a man, she finds that she's incredibly attracted to him. He doesn't feel the same way, but he never avoids her; in fact, there are times when he makes it a point to have a conversation with her. And, when he finally does get a girlfriend, he isn't afraid to introduce her to Mary, who, as you can probably guess, is crushed. She realizes that she wasn't ready for her first marriage. She finally fell in love in her thirties, but it was to a man who ultimately divorced her and left her with nothing. At this advanced stage in her life, she just wants someone to talk to.
Mary's life is symbolized by a used car she purchased with what little money she had stashed away. We never see it fall to pieces, but there are a couple of densely worded scenes in which she rants about the mechanical problems, the break-ins, and the financial woes they entail. She's a terrible driver and gets lost quite easily, even on routes she has successfully walked many times. She relies a little too often on take-away food, since she's not much of a cook and hasn't dated anyone who would take that responsibility. She says in an early scene that she's happy to be independent, but the fact is, she wants to be taken care of. Gerri addresses her just as simply as she does her husband; if she considers Mary a friend, then I find it peculiar she didn't make more of an effort to get her help. She is, after all, a counselor.
Other characters are introduced. Some are written out much sooner than we'd expect them to be, begging the question of why they were included in the first place. Consider Tom's friend, Ken (Peter Wight), who's aging, overweight, a smoker, a drinker, and being dragged into retirement kicking and screaming. He realizes, with depressing clarity, that he doesn't want to take the train back home, for there's absolutely nothing there waiting for him. He's attracted to Mary. She most certainly doesn't feel the same way about him. The most curious character is Janet (Imelda Staunton), who appears in exactly two scenes as a clinically depressed insomniac unwilling to partake in Gerri's counseling. When the film was over, I was certain that nothing would have been lost had this character been eliminated.
A more substantial but equally subdued subplot is introduced later in the film, when Tom attends the funeral of his sister-in-law and invites his brother, Ronnie (David Bradley), to stay with him for a couple of days. Ronnie's son, Carl (Martin Savage), is an undependable hothead who I suspect was that way long before the death of his mother. Ronnie and Mary eventually have a conversation, although Mary does most of the talking. Is this her story? It might seem that way, especially since she's the subject of the final shot. Still, I have a feeling that "Another Year" isn't anyone's story in particular. Friends come and go. Families get together and separate. People live, people die - seasons change. I grant you that this isn't a particularly fulfilling message. But this is a movie about the mundane, about still frames in people's lives. You see this movie, and then you move on.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great movie and blu-ray!
A warm, touching, sad, and funny movie. One of best I've seen over the last couple of years. I love good British movies like this one. You can't go wring with this one.
Published 4 months ago by Swonny
4.0 out of 5 stars
Sparks of Enlightenment Amid the Grief
Much has been written about this film already and I will try not to retrace ground already covered. It is not a film for those who want tidy endings or a formulaic sequence of... Read more
Published 4 months ago by Richard R. Powell
4.0 out of 5 stars
Is this all?
Don't get me wrong -- this slice-of-life movie is very well done. But how is it that such excellent writing, directing, and acting leave me sad and a bit puzzled? Read more
Published 10 months ago by Steve V
4.0 out of 5 stars
On the surface this movie is tedious- And that is also it's charm.
At the end of the movie we were left to wonder, "what was this about anyway?"
On the surface this is the everyday (mundane) life of geologist Tom (Jim Broadbent) and his... Read more
On the surface this is the everyday (mundane) life of geologist Tom (Jim Broadbent) and his... Read more
Published 10 months ago by Terri J. Rice
4.0 out of 5 stars
A lovely study of lonely characters.
Another Year is a remarkable drama about a family and one lonely person who happens to be a family friend. Read more
Published 14 months ago by Harkanwar Anand
3.0 out of 5 stars
2 1/2 stars for a Mike Leigh kitchen drama
I was certainly looking forward to seeing this acclaimed Mike Leigh film. We are introduced to a middle aged London couple enjoying each other and their lives. Read more
Published 16 months ago by M. Oleson
4.0 out of 5 stars
MIKE LEIGH, OPUS 11
Mike Leigh, in my opinion, is nowadays the most interesting British director working in the U.K. His last movies are without exception of the highest standard. Read more
Published 18 months ago by Daniel S.
2.0 out of 5 stars
The British ... always more unhinged than we think
ANOTHER YEAR (2010) is a strange, seemingly directionless voyeur's dream. Simply put it is Woody Allen without Allen, and without anything Allen usually brings. Read more
Published 19 months ago by E. Hernandez
2.0 out of 5 stars
Great acting wasted on utterly BORING movie
I bought this film based on the directing of Mike Leigh and the lead actor Jim Broadbent, who had so successfully linked up in Topsy Turvy - a remarkable insight into the lives and... Read more
Published 19 months ago by Andrew L. Pearlman
3.0 out of 5 stars
Very good acting/No ending/Singles-bashing plot
This film was very watchable but, as with so many films these days, it just ends without any resolution to the story. Read more
Published 20 months ago by Chandra
