I simply cannot believe that 93% of the top critics on Rotten Tomatoes love this movie. It is unrelentingly dreary and psychologically disturbing. The so called 'Happy Couple" are so utterly disconnected from any emotional reality that they are the flip side of their friends who are alternatively numbingly depressed, hysterically manic, or poisonously polluted by drink and food. I am beginning to think that critics have forgotten what good movies are. Either that or they do no like movies but only FILM. This is a FILM. Heed my warning: this is neither "Secrets and Lies" nor "Topsy-Turvy". This is, to coin an era-relative phrase, a bummer. The entirely "adult" audience was groaning and fidgeting and we saw it in an intellectually advanced town. Save your money. ISEEEVERYMOVIE

Another Year is the latest offering from Mike Leigh and among the most emotionally affecting films of the year. The film, among other things, studies age and its various consequences and connotations. Among his illustrious string of performance pieces, Another Year offers the very best performances in any Leigh film thus far and adds Lesley Manville's role as Mary to a competitive list of cinema's very best drunkard performances. The other two central performances of Jim Broadbent's Tom and Ruth Sheen's Gerri give off a magnificent parental warmth and naturally convinces you of their forty years together. But it's Manville, especially at the end, who ends up shattering your heart. It's also among the most visually sophisticated and cinematic of Leigh's films, showing each of the four seasons with a different tone and feel appropriate to that time of the year. Another Year is magnificent.

This is a film not unlike Blue Valentine, where every emotion being expressed on the screen is felt by the audience. The material is highly melodramatic, but realer and truer than any reality show or documentary. The performances are uniformly excellent, with a stand-out, memorable performance by Lesley Manville. Two of the biggest slights by the Oscar nominators this year were the elimation of both Ryan Gosling for Blue Valentine(how could Michelle Williams get a nomination but not him...basically a two character film) and Lesley Manville who should have replaced Nicole Kidman. Her performance is so real and hits every nerve in the viewers psyche that you come away with feelings of either pathos or utter hate for her character. Brillant!

I was a little skeptical when I read the review but my wife though we should see it. You won't like this movie if you need car chases, fights, sex, violence, bad language or lots of action. You will like it if you are interested in the human condition. I was waiting for more when it ended. I guess I need another year. I did have a sense that I was looking through someone's window. It was actually four short stories in one all revolving around Tom & Jerri who have life and each other figured out and seem content. Don't take the kids or teenagers.

...if you enjoy top notch acting and a script that develops characters richly and depicts adult relationships unflinchingly. But this won't be everyone's cup of tea. There is no sex or special effects or car chases or exploding buildings or killing. Just the real stuff of everyday life lovingly observed.