Family dinners, Mike Leigh once told an interviewer, gave him “a lifetime’s ammunition” for his filmmaking. In his new film, Hard Truths, one of the most revelatory—and painful—scenes takes place at the dinner table: Pansy, played by Marianne Jean-Baptiste, turns her acid tongue on her silent husband and son, unspooling a diatribe aimed at the excesses of modern life she finds so exhausting, from stupid pet owners who swathe their dogs in fashionable clothing to charity workers begging for cash outside of grocery stores. The film is about two sisters, Pansy and Chantelle (Michele Austin), whose opposing reactions to the death of their mother and the grinding quality of their working lives are made into the stuff of a searching domestic drama about grief and class. It’s a fitting entry in Leigh’s oeuvre of bleakly comic social realist films, one whose framing, J. Hoberman observes in his review, “imbues this latest account of a dysfunctional family with a measure of tragic gravitas.” “Initially funny in an outrageous, Marx Brothers sort of way,” the film morphs into a careful and pained study of one person’s almost intractable inability to relate to the world around her. What makes it so true to life, Hoberman writes, is that in the end we are given “no promise of reconciliation or emotional catharsis.” Read “The Uncomfortable Genius of Mike Leigh”