Another Year (2010)
This simple and gentle film has a bold basic premise, as we follow a happily sweet married elder couple for a year, without any sort of immediate conflict or narrative beyond that. This works because they get visits throughout the year by friends and family, and they have tons of issues and problems. This makes for an interesting contrast between people content and happy with what life has given them, and those that are not. It is all very mundane but incredibly fascinating and mesmerizing to watch, though it take a good hour for the film to properly settle for me. Towards the end there is an incredible simple yet utterly emotional scene where two people who are strangers to each other, but they each know this couple well, meet and have a pretty mundane superficial conversation (the man is basically answering with single syllables) that says a thousands times more than the words spoken. Impossible to define why it works but it was magic to me.
Rating: 4