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This review was originally published on September 9, 2024, as a part of our Toronto International Film Festival coverage.

In Hard Truths, Mike Leigh's beautifully humane drama, the writer-director takes us into the lives of an ordinary British Jamaican family with the easily bothered, miserable Pansy at the center. Starring a ferocious and convincing Marianne Jean-Baptiste in an Oscar-worthy performance, Pansy finds a way to quarrel with everyone. The film concentrates little on plot structure and instead slowly peels back the layers of its characters and challenges us to rethink what we know about our elders. Inherently, witnessing a woman propel insults at people is humorous, but sadness layers the script, making it deeply moving.

Hard Truths, released in 2025, is set in post-covid London and follows Pansy, a working-class Black woman dealing with the aftermath of global panic, navigating a fractured psyche amid ongoing personal and societal challenges.

Director Mike LeighRelease...

Hard Truths is the latest movie by acclaimed filmmaker Mike Leigh, with options available for audiences to view it. Mike Leigh is an English writer and director who's been making original films since the 1980s, including critically acclaimed masterpieces like Naked and Secrets & Lies. Hard Truths premiered at 2024's Toronto International Film Festival, where Screen Rant's review praised its outstanding, Academy Award-worthy performances and hard-hitting, emotional script. With the Oscars coming up soon, Hard Truths is a movie to keep an eye out for.

Marianne Jean-Baptiste leads the cast of Hard Truths as Pansy, a woman suffering from mental health issues who takes her anger out on family and friends. Despite everything, her sister, Chantelle (Michele Austin), stands by her and supports her. Mike Leigh's new movie is about family and the shaky connections that bind human beings in the modern world. The film has been praised for...

Hard Truths reunites Mike Leigh with Marianne Jean-Baptiste, and here’s the trailer for the brand new film right here.

As it begins its rollout at film festivals, the first film from Mike Leigh since 2018’s Peterloo is nearing its release. The movie goes by the name of Hard Truths, and it reunites Leigh with Marianne Jean-Baptiste. She was one of the stars of Secrets And Lies, which remains arguably Leigh’s most successful film.

As always, the production of Hard Truths has been secretive, but we know that Bryony Miller and Michele Austin are in the cast as well. Studiocanal has backed the movie, and released the first trailer for the movie, which looks like this…

The synopsis for the film reads as follows…

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.

Despite David O. Selznick’s desire to keep his cinematic adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier’s novel Rebecca as true to the source novel as possible and not alienate its built-in fan base, at least one change was unavoidable en route to passing Hollywood’s “Hays Code.” Because it concerns a late-arriving revelation that would spoil things, I won’t say what it was. Just know that this seemingly small alteration on paper beneficially reverberates throughout the entirety of what Selznick and director Alfred Hitchcock put onscreen by allowing their characters room to be sympathetically complex where loyalties are concerned in ways that prove impossible otherwise. So while the ghost of the Manderley estate’s former mistress haunts the proceedings in both scenarios via guilty consciences, only one renders its inhabitants as monsters.

I don’t, however, come to this conclusion in order to share that Du Maurier’s intent...