by Steve Newman

Created on: January 11, 2011   Last Updated: January 12, 2011

A Mike Leigh film is like no other film you're ever likely to see. Other directors try and ape his style, but always have to add a movie cliché or two, which inevitably turns the whole enterprise into just another film – a good one maybe, but just another film. In other words Mike Leigh is unique.

 And his latest, Another Year, is Leigh at his sit-back-and-watch-what-happens-next best, allowing small events to take on huge and emotionally powerful status that is quite shocking and utterly moving because we see ourselves, in close-up on the screen, and hear ourselves in the limited use of words and the dreadful awful silences.

 Another Year is about love, about our inability to express it, and our desire to have it expressed to us, it's also about being pre-occupied with your own life, about looking inward and not outward; it's also about living your life vicariously through others, which is what the character Mary – played brilliantly by Lesley Manville – does.

 Mary is a middle-aged woman with two broken relationships behind her who looks to Tom and Gerri (played stunningly by Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen) as the ideal caring couple who are always there for Mary, giving her a bed when she needs one, and as much wine as she can drink. And although Tom and Gerri (which is a good running joke) are good, honest people you soon realise they are inward looking and obsessive. When they are not digging holes or dishing out advice (Tom is an engineering geologist, and Gerri some sort of physcotherapist) they seem to spend all their leisure time digging in their allotment, and know doubt offering each other horticultural advice as the share a thermos flask of tea as they shelter in the shed from the rain. Leigh creates within them a calmness that, on the one hand, is admirable and attractive, but on the other gradually grows quite cold and inevitably brutal when it comes to protecting their way of life. Only at the end of the film does Mary seem to realise this as she implodes amidst the family chatter going on at the dinner table, a table to which she has been reluctantly (“There's plenty of food...”) invited. It is a totally shattering piece of cinema.

 David Bradley (Mr Filch in the Harry Potter films) appears two thirds of the way through the film, but my goodness it was worth the wait because the camera just loves him to bits, with his wonderful hawk-like features filling the screen so that every movement of the eyes, or the lips – no matter how slight – is picked up and interpreted by the audience within seconds, making words almost redundant. This is screen acting in its most diluted form, so strong that if you were to put a lighted match to it it would burn like a high octane incendiary device. For me he is the star of Another Year.

 In fairness the film doesn't put a foot wrong, with great performances from Peter Wright as a man on the bring of a heart attack through over eating, smoking and drinking; you just felt every mouthful. It was the best performance I've seen this accomplished stage and screen actor do in years.

 And Imelda Staunton's brief, but chilling, opening sequence will haunt you for years.

 But as with every Mike Leigh film he deliberately leaves a void at the centre of his character's lives, a void that can only be filled by some form of spirituality, by purpose and meaning. It's not enough to just potter in your allotment and eat your own produce; there has to be more commitment.

Go and see this film.

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