News Summary

• Mike Leigh’s final film confronts the dominant theme of his career.
• The result is one of his most formidable stories in spite of its scope.
• It exalts in what love and tenderness can do for a person, and just as honestly pays heed to what they can’t.
• Each of these people are on their own, and, because of the film's narrow timeline, none of them appear more than once in a shared air of hopelessness.
• It suggests that “so much could be enough — could be everything — under different circumstances.”