Mike Leigh's latest (his first since the epic Peterloo (2018)) and therefore inevitable. His second effort with Marianne Jean-Baptiste (The Cell (2000), Spy Game (2001)) after Secrets and Lies (1996). This is a slice of the Caribbean community in London, sort-of updating Steve McQueen's Small Axe (2020) to the present, post-COVID, day. Most of it is generous, some of it gently humorous but Jean-Baptiste's character is too much hard work. Michele Austin (also Secrets and Lies (1996), Another Year (2010)) has more fun as her hairdresser/sister with her daughters Sophia Brown and Ani Nelson. The catharsis, when it comes, is not enough and they do not stick the ending. The overweight, underemployed, underdeveloped son trope, here embodied by Tuwaine Barrett, recurs from All or Nothing (2002).
Like Lee Tamahori Leigh has most often taken the women's point-of-view.
A Critic's Pick by Manohla Dargis. Wendy Ide: three stars. "Pansy is the most relentlessly abrasive character in a Mike Leigh film since David Thewlis’s rampaging Mancunian hate machine in 1993’s Naked." — but his running-at-the-mouth was far more amusing than anything here! Peter Sobczynski. Andrew Katzenstein summarises it at length for the New York Review of Books. Jason Di Rosso.
