Best movies of 2024 in the US: No 5 – Hard Truths

Marianne Jean-Baptiste gives an immense, acidic performance as Pansy, a woman on the edge, in Mike Leigh’s strange, morbid miracle of a film
• Our countdown of the top 50 films in the US in 2024
• More on the best culture of 2024

Pockets on babygrows and feet on new sofas. Parking and flowers and disregard of coasters. Foxes and packaging and dating and grins, these are a few of Pansy’s least favourite things. What the heroine of Mike Leigh’s steamingly brilliant new drama does like is less clear. She spends her days under the bedcovers or further scrubbing her already-sterile semi or berating anyone who wanders into her crosshairs. But none of those bring her any actual pleasure.

Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) is on the precipice, yelling at the waves. Stricken by some horrific depression or trauma-triggered rage, she barrels through the world like a toxic improv Larry David, picking holes in everything, bubbling over with a caustic confidence that’s 90% jaundice, 10% justified.

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