Bad mouth: Marianne Jean-Baptiste in Mike Leigh’s ‘Hard Truths’.

HARD TRUTHS **** (97 minutes) M
In the latest offering from veteran social realist maestro Mike Leigh we are presented with a woman so full of scorn for everything and everyone she goes passed the point of being downright repulsive to being downright entertaining.

Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) lives comfortably in a neat suburban house provided by her diffident, hard-working plumber husband Curtley (David Webber), her mission in life being to make life as uncomfortable as possible for everyone unfortunate enough to stray into her orbit.

Along with the long-suffering members of her family, random people in the retail trade such as cashiers and furniture store sales assistants fall victim to the barbs of her bile, her spiteful verbosity the symptoms of deep-seated depression.

Proving once again his mastery at creating searing character portraits of people brimming with rage and regret, Leigh – now 82 and clearly still full of fire – allows Pansy to give full vent to her dislike and disgust for the world while showing how such a force of ill-nature can have limited effects on those around her.

The chief victim is her son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), a lonely, introverted, taciturn, over-weight man-child who, at 22, seems content to mope around the house and in the streets with no prospects and no social skills.

Defying Pansy relentless onslaught of gloom is her gleeful sister Chantelle (Michele Austin), manager of a popular neighbourhood hair salon and mother to two exuberant daughters Kayla (Ani Nelson) and Aleisha (Sophia Brown) who, like their mum, refuse to be sucked into Pansy’s whirlpool of woe.

As with Naked and Another Year – among his finest films – Leigh is here interested primarily in the Sturm und Drang of the drama and largely unconcerned with anything resembling a conventional plot.

And as with Naked (a film with virtually no plot at all) it doesn’t matter. Leigh loves loose ends and open endings into which the viewer can project some sense of hope into the imagined afterlife of the characters.

Hard Truths is not only one of Mike Leigh’s best works, it also features unusually stately cinematography, with very precise framing and composition. His use of mirrors, for instance, is exemplary.

As for the central performance by Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who worked with Leigh on 1996’s Secrets and Lies (his best film?), it’s stellar, brandishing the level of commitment that has become his signature.

The scene where Pansy starts laughing before going to a different place ranks as one of the most powerful single takes in his peerless oeuvre.

ONE OF THEM DAYS *** (97 minutes) MA
In this breezy, frenetically paced, easy-to-like race-the-clock comedy in which about half the dialogue is barely intelligible, two best friends race across town trying to raise the rent money.

Though ambitious fast-food worker Dreux (Keke Palmer) is the very model of a smart, with-it, hard-working modern woman, her artist flatmate Alyssa (SZA) isn’t so together, especially when it comes to handling bread (a colloquial term denoting “money”.)

Entrusted by Dreux with the rent money, Alyssa in turn entrusted it to moronic, super-shlonged toy boy Keshawn (Joshua Neal) who promptly blew it and ran off, leaving the girls with but a few hours to get the moolah (another slang term denoting “money” or “cash”) to their landlord who is planning to send them to the kerb.

These girls are each gifted with turbo-charged motormouths that renders much of what they utter all-but-incomprehensible except for when they mercifully slow down enough to deliver a laugh line.

With big-name comedian Katt Williams in a small but funny supporting role, the film is a fun way to burn up 90 minutes, with the leads being particularly easy on the eye (is it illegal to say that now?) as they merrily engage in energetic spurts of verbal and physical comedy.

Briskly directed by Lawrence Lamont from a screenplay by Syreeta Singleton, fans of story structure will admire how dutifully the film follows the conventions of commercial comedies, including the deft use of the deus ex machina, an ancient plot device after which the film’s main character is presumably named.

EVERY LITTLE THING ***1/2 (93 minutes) PG
Absolutely fascinating, beautifully photographed documentary about Hollywood resident Terry Masear who works as a saviour to injured and abandoned hummingbirds. A sterling testament to the depth of devotion some souls possess towards nature, the marvellous slow-mo shots of the tiny birds in flight are enthralling. Australian director Sally Aitken grounds the beauty of the birds and of Masear’s dedication to her vocation with a heartbreaking backstory. A truly lovely doco.

MICKEY 17 ** (137 minutes) M
A major misfire by any fair measure, Mickey 17 probably ranks as the least adventurous movie yet made about human cloning, the ever-topical issue definitively addressed in Woody Allen’s 1973 sci-fi masterwork Sleeper, the prescient genius of which filmmakers today are still struggling to match.

Set in the near future, cheap labour for dirty and dangerous jobs is provided by a cloning process where people (called “expendables”) are reanimated after being killed on the job.

The contents of their minds are stored after death then downloaded into the new cloned body, which is made from gloop consisting of organic leftovers, offcuts and human waste.

Mickey (the versatile Robert Pattinson, now several light years away from his Twilight days) is one such shlub, constantly being asked what death feels like.

On his 17th go round he doesn’t die like he’s supposed to, making things awkward when he shows up after Mickey 18 has already been created.

What a massive disappointment this mess turns out to be.

After a strong start with a good line in humour and loads of great story promises about the ethics of commercial cloning, writer/director Bong Joon-ho (The Parasite; The Host) becomes way too preoccupied with all these repulsive-looking critters that resemble steroid-fed woodlice (aka Butcher Boys).

These creatures inhabit the icy planet being exploited by a cheesy, grandstanding industrialist (Mark Ruffalo) and his extra-cheesy wife (Toni Collette, reminding us of her comedy chops).

For some reason the film shifts lanes and becomes a tale about championing the rights of these oversized bugs – which are not bugs at all but thinking, feeling beings! Once the humans start communicating with them through a translator the film – made on an obviously huge budget – simply loses grip, much of it simply becoming dull.

On top of that, when are modern, hotshot, you-beaut, hipster, up-the-academy filmmakers going to learn to discipline their narratives?

Too many films of feathery substance typically run over two hours nowadays, with this piece of expensive, unfocussed fluff being an especially egregious example.

As is often said, it would have been much better had it been much shorter.