Movie: Another Year

Last night, I watched the movie Another Year on the Criterion Channel. They summarize the movie as follows:

Mike Leigh traces four seasons in the lives of a contented, happily married couple (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen) and the troubled, significantly less stable friends and family who surround them. Extracting wonderfully nuanced, lived-in performances from his remarkable ensemble cast—in particular a scene-stealing Lesley Manville as the lonely, hard-drinking divorcée who yearns for a relationship—Leigh crafts a generous, bittersweet look at the ebbs and flows of everyday life.

It is a commercial feature-length movie, but it is not the sort of movie that people most commonly watch. That is, it does not really have a beginning, middle, and end and a character with a tragic flaw that is resolved by the end of the story. The picture is episodic and is more of a character study than a standard narrative. The couple who are the main characters are well-adjusted people; but their friends are all deeply flawed oddballs. I quite enjoyed the picture.