ANDY HEDGECOCK, MARIA DUARTE and ANGUS REID review Ackroyd & Harvey: The Art of Activism, The Lost Bus, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, and Happyend
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A brilliant performance
LOUIS BAYMAN admires Mike Leigh’s bleakly comic take on a black woman’s experience of depression that offers no easy answers
TOUR DE FORCE: Marianne Jean-Baptiste in Hard Truths
[IMDb] 
MARY CONWAY relishes the spectacle of a domestic implosion in a setting strangely divorced from any social, political or cultural context
SUSAN DARLINGTON appreciates a retelling of the Merlin myth that emphasises family and belonging
JAN WOOLF is beguiled by the tempting notion that Freud psychoanalysed Hitler in a comedy that explores the vulnerability of a damaged individual
TONY BURKE reviews new releases from Cheikh Lo, Mishra & Deepa Shakthi, N’Faly Kouyate
Gin Lane by William Hogarth is a critique of 18th-century London’s growing funeral trade, posits DAN O’BRIEN
ANDY HEDGECOCK sees his scepticism lessened by a story is more complex and far-reaching than is initially apparent
IF you were to ask a computer programme to come up with a title for a new Mike Leigh film it could do no better than Hard Truths.
Echoing the title of his very first film in 1971, Bleak Moments, Hard Truths represents a variation on the veteran British director’s recurrent theme of the delusions that keep us a step away from despair.
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