Friday, February 18, 2011

The Cinematheque Reviews:
Another Year

Director Mike Leigh has a curious habit of creating films that defy definition.  They are not comedy, yet they are not drama either.  They are some cross between the comically tragic and the tragically comic.  His films at once portray a world that is so realistic we easily find ourselves trapped inside them, yet so alien, we feel we are watching some sort of cosmic experiment run its course.  Drab and squat and gray, and lined with a certain hopelessness, yet also full of some sort of otherworldly eternal hope.  The director's latest, Another Year, is no different in playing around with such contradictions.  Desolate and at the same time, elegant. It's a wonderful little trick Leigh always seems to have up his sleeve.



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