Mike Leigh and his collaborators, this time, the great Marianne Jean Baptiste as the lead, dig deeper into prevailing humanity underneath all the bitterness and hate. And it's a sight to see.

| Apr 24, 2025

The film is deliberate, conscious of its aims, but also contains the contradictoriness and unexpectedness of real life.

| Apr 24, 2025

...[Hard Truths] has a strange dignity, walking throughout its entire runtime with its head held high. Despite its flaws, it has more than earned it. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 27, 2025

The characters are too well-drawn and the situations they are working through are too acutely observed to ever make us want to turn away or miss a minute of what is being said – or left unsaid.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 25, 2025

Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Michele Austin star in Mike Leigh's tale of two sisters, whose juxtaposed temperaments showcase a deliberate, ultimately meaningful contemplation of the need to acknowledge trauma but not be defined by it.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Mar 21, 2025

It’s an intense, at times overwhelming experience, more humiliating than humorous, and grappling with Leigh’s recurring theme: the sheer difficulty of living.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Mar 18, 2025

It’s a character-driven drama that jolts you awake to how pain can manifest in people, and why even the most annoying ones are deserving of compassion.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 12, 2025

His characters are a function of social classes, dysfunctional families, personal obsessions, and dumb luck. They are instantly relatable because we meet such people everywhere.

| Mar 9, 2025

Jean-Baptiste is amazing as this shouty, judgmental, frightened, lonely woman...she delivers a performance for the ages.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Mar 7, 2025

Not only one of Mike Leigh’s best works, it features unusually stately cinematography, with very precise framing and composition...As for the central performance by Jean-Baptiste, it’s stellar, brandishing the commitment that has become Leigh's signature.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 7, 2025

For those on Leigh’s wavelength, Hard Truths is his funniest film in many years, and as emotionally truthful as the title promises, despite a few flickers of sentimentality around the edges.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 6, 2025

Hard Truths is the master at work. Outrageous, heartbreaking, and considered filmmaking. Almost every Mike Leigh film is an event – whether small or large. Hard Truths is small and large because Pansy is both, but she is never a cliché or a figure of fun.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 6, 2025

Through [Mike Leigh] and [Marianne] Jean-Baptiste’s detailed craftsmanship, Pansy earns our compassion in droves, leaving the hardest truth of all being that her brokenness, both valid and put-upon, makes her as human as everyone else.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 6, 2025

Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s performance is so phenomenally horrible it hurts to watch.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 5, 2025

This is a tale driven by a constant stream of clever, colourful conversations. Listen hard, and it will feel as if this challenging movie is speaking directly to you.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 5, 2025

There is something very interesting about Hard Truths: while it engages in dialogue with the feeling of the times, with anger and rage, it does so in a way that is unusual in contemporary cinema. It does so with few concessions...[Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 3, 2025

A character as extreme and unpleasant as Pansy would normally earn no sympathy from viewers, but Jean-Baptiste is so astonishing in the part that she teases out glimpses of her latent humanity.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 2, 2025

Coarse and without answers (or questions), [Mike Leigh] has composed the worst film of his filmography.

| Feb 28, 2025

A movie about the depression and their tentacles. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 26, 2025

It's hilarious, until it becomes devastating. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 25, 2025