Tender Loving Care

Mike Leigh’s tender and gently humorous drama follows two best friends working as social workers while trying to hold together their own complicated lives - and may prove to be the veteran director’s final film.Amy has moved back in with her best friend Rosie after a difficult breakup.

Both women work in social services, spending their days dealing with people in crisis and trying to help those who often have nowhere else to turn.

Back home, Amy’s ageing parents are facing problems of their own, and the pressures of work, family and getting older begin to overlap.Mike Leigh’s latest film is a beautifully observed portrait of ordinary lives, finding humour and tenderness in the everyday business of looking after other people.

Kate O’Flynn and Alice Bailey Johnson are terrific as the inseparable friends, with Marion Bailey and Paul Jesson completing a wonderfully natural ensemble.

There is something especially poignant about watching Leigh - now in his eighties - return to the themes that have run through his work for decades: friendship, family, class, ageing and the complicated business of being human.

If this does prove to be his final film, it makes for a particularly fitting farewell.