Directed by Mike Leigh. Starring Jim Broadbent, Lesley Manville, Ruth Sheen, Imelda Staunton, Peter Wight, David Bradley, Oliver Maltman 12A cert, lim release, 129 min

CONTINUING ON from last year's Happy Go Lucky, Another Yearmight easily sport the tagline: "What happens when well-adjusted optimists wander into a Mike Leigh picture?"

Though less tyrannically jolly than Sally Hawkins, geologist Tom and counsellor Gerri (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen) make for such a contended duo they might easily be snapped up for a kitchen-sink remake of Hart to Hart. Successful, considerate, happily married and pottering along at a pace suited to their autumn years, they are a bright light around which various malcontents and screw-ups hover.

Chief among these human moths is Mary (Lesley Manville), a highly strung, pathologically single girl- woman with a drinking problem and an entirely unrequited crush on Tom and Gerri’s son, Joe (Oliver Maltman). Equally dysfunctional is family friend Ken (Peter Wight), a lonely, pudgy, orally fixated alcoholic.

Set over various seasonal get- togethers, this latest Mike Leigh joint takes its own sweet time coalescing into anything like drama. As ever, the devil is in the small yet emblematic domestic details: Mary gets a car but it keeps breaking down; Tom and Gerri tend their vegetable patch in all weathers; Tom’s sister-in-law dies and his bereaved brother Ronnie (David Bradley) comes to visit.

The film is affectingly performed and achingly authentic, yet its great strengths frequently double as structural flaws. The central characters provide a compassionate gaze at the heart of the drama, but they are passive observers rather than primary participants, a trope that never truly sits well in the movieverse. Imelda Staunton gives an eye- watering, powerful portrait of depression that doesn’t feel all that organic in a study of middle-class neuroses. A lengthy funeral sequence is entirely tangential.

There is, moreover, a disquieting subtext that comes from pitching married, affluent suburbanites as happy while their single friends languish in misery. Isn't this sort of moral better suited to Sex and the City?

Don't get us wrong. Another Yearis a fine film, embellished by a beautifully flighty turn from Manville. It just doesn't quite grip in the way that, say, Vera Drakeor Secrets & Liesdid.