Empire by Kim Newman

Measured in pace, yet thoroughly gripping and completely accessible. The title soft-sells the picture, but it's among the best of this or any year. And Manville should clear some shelf space for well-deserved awards.

Time Out by Keith Uhlich

These characters are more than what we see on the surface, and it's thanks to Leigh's rigorous yet generous eye that we never just gawk at the drama.

The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw

The power of this film creeps up on you by stealth; its dramatic idiom is admittedly mannered in the Leigh style but shy of caricature, and designed consistently to abrade the audience's consciousness without irritating – fingertips down the blackboard, not fingernails.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) by Liam Lacey

Extracting big drama out of small events is Mike Leigh's forte, and with his latest little masterpiece, Another Year, the English director pushes himself to the extreme.

Chicago Reader by J.R. Jones

A brief but piercing cameo by Imelda Staunton (Vera Drake), as a desolate old woman who fiercely rejects professional counseling for depression, drives home Leigh's greatest insight, that true happiness is not found but realized.

Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert

Leigh's Another Year is like a long, purifying soak in empathy.

Entertainment Weekly by Owen Gleiberman

What it does have is an overwhelming bittersweet melancholy at the passing of life from middle age into…well, you could call it late middle age.

Christian Science Monitor by Peter Rainer

A quintessential Mike Leigh performance. It deepens as it goes along until, in the end, in its final close-up, it overwhelms.

New York Post by Kyle Smith

Getting a small cohort of humanity dead right is an impressive artistic achievement, but Mike Leigh's beautifully modulated English drama Another Year advances even farther.

The A.V. Club by Tasha Robinson

The performances are winning, the story is surprising without relying on unlikely twists, and the relationships are the richest and most nuanced since Leigh's "Secrets & Lies."

New York Daily News by Elizabeth Weitzman

The perfect haven from the cheap ironies and cruel indifference we all have to field both in life and, far too often, at the movies.

Los Angeles Times by Kenneth Turan

It may sound commonplace, but in the hands of master filmmaker Mike Leigh, the everyday becomes extraordinary.

New York Magazine (Vulture) by David Edelstein

Another year, another Mike Leigh gem.

Boxoffice Magazine by Richard Mowe

Mike Leigh has a knack of making the ordinary extraordinary. Here he deals with themes of class, family and depression over a period of a year, breaking it up into seasonal chapters.

NPR by Ella Taylor

Another Year is a stacked deck of a movie that draws a harshly unforgiving, sometimes smug line between boomers who've made good and those who've fallen by the wayside.

The Hollywood Reporter by Ray Bennett

Acutely observed but gloomy and lacking narrative, it tells of 12 months in the life of a decent but dull suburban couple and their friends, most of whom you would go out of your way to avoid at a party.

Village Voice

I haven't seen a film this year that so openly invited me to revile each and every one of its characters-and I reviewed "The Human Centipede."