Hard Truths (2024)

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Browning Cinema

New at the Browning
Directed by Mike Leigh
With Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Michele Austin, Tuwaine Barrett
Rated R, 97 minutes, DCP

Legendary filmmaker Mike Leigh returns to the contemporary world with a fierce, compassionate, and often darkly humorous study of family and the thorny ties that bind us. Reunited with Leigh for the first time since multiple Oscar-nominated Secrets and Lies was released almost three decades ago, 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 (Michele Austin), 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.