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

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

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

Call it the sorrow of the ordinary front door, of which Hard Truths grows into a graceful study. Credit to Jean-Baptiste and the actors. And to Leigh, for making, at 81, one of the best films of his career. 

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 8, 2025

Make no mistake, these performances are certainly worth the weight of attention that is placed upon them. But great turns don’t always amount to a great picture.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 5, 2025

A gruelling but ultimately rewarding experience, this is Leigh at his most confrontational, devastating and humane, aided by the unadulterated power of Jean-Baptiste’s career-redefining performance.

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

A really fine film.

| Feb 1, 2025

Jean-Baptiste will rightly take all the plaudits, but it’s a reminder of the careful work Leigh does. For all the naturalism, Leigh is a stylist as much as Pedro Almodovar is, just one more interested in capturing scared humans than plot.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 31, 2025

Baptiste is toweringly real: formidable and heartbreaking in her performance.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 31, 2025

We’re drawn in close to Jean-Baptiste’s features -- titanic in their expressiveness, twisted by an unseen poison. The actor never shaves down any of Pansy’s thorns, but lets us love her despite them.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 31, 2025

Jean-Baptiste is magnificent, and the film is compelling, and it will linger in the mind, but it is also 90 minutes of watching someone being aggressively unhappy without properly knowing why. This Pansy certainly brought out my inner Pansy.

| Jan 30, 2025

[Jean-Baptiste's] great achievement is to generate sympathy for a woman who allows those around her not a moment of consideration. Her mood is a great sadness for husband, son and sister but a genuine tragedy for the woman herself.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 29, 2025

Leigh’s trademark approaches—the dramatically significant reaction shots, the subtextual selves bubbling up within each conversation—are all on display here and are not original... the story itself, with its microfocus on impotent rage, feels revelatory.

| Jan 29, 2025

It’s a tour de force, another product of Leigh’s method of protracted workshopping and improvisation before the shoot (14 weeks of rehearsal, followed by a six-week shoot in this case). Pansy is as much her creation as Leigh’s, if not more so.

| Jan 24, 2025

Hard Truths itself is astonishingly sensitive for a portrait of someone who often behaves monstrously. Leigh depicts Pansy’s journey with a wrenching empathy, carefully revealing how her irascibility is caused by burdens both specific and mundane.

| Jan 24, 2025

Hard Truths is in fact quite generous in its exploration of a woman in profound pain, and you want to meet it with the same compassion.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 24, 2025

British auteur Mike Leigh turns viewers into amateur psychiatrists with his transfixing new film, “Hard Truths,” and its main character, Pansy, played with astonishing force by Marianne Jean-Baptiste. Figuring out what’s bugging her is the challenge.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 23, 2025

In partnership with his actors, Leigh excavates and displays the most vulnerable emotions and experiences a person can have, his films slowly building to cathartic crescendos, with glimmers of hope and salvation shining through.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 18, 2025

I’d qualify this as minor Leigh but with major performances; as the antagonistic protagonist Pansy, Marianne Jean-Baptiste (previously acclaimed for her role in Leigh’s 1996 film Secrets & Lies) is hilarious and heartbreaking.

| Jan 16, 2025

Pansy is exhausting, for the viewer as well as her family, and the film doesn’t provide the catharsis needed to turn so much bile into a path toward redemption… or anything, really.

| Jan 15, 2025