In the many beautifully observed working-class dramedies he’s made over the past five decades, the British writer and director Mike Leigh has returned again and again to one simple yet endlessly resonant question: Why are some people happy, while others are not? Why does Nicola, the sullen 20-something in Leigh’s 1990 film, Life Is Sweet, seem incapable of even a moment’s peace or pleasure? By contrast, how does Poppy, the upbeat heroine of Leigh’s 2008 comedy, Happy-Go-Lucky, manage to greet every misfortune with a smile?

Leigh’s new movie, Hard Truths, could have been titled Unhappy-Go-Lucky. It follows a middle-aged North London misanthrope named Pansy, who’s played, in the single greatest performance I saw in 2024, by Marianne Jean-Baptiste.

You might know Jean-Baptiste from Leigh’s wonderful 1996 film, Secrets & Lies, in which she played a shy, unassuming London optometrist seeking out her birth mother. But there’s nothing unassuming about Pansy, who leads a life of seething, unrelenting misery. She spends most of her time indoors, barking orders and insults at her solemn husband, Curtley, and their 22-year-old son, Moses.

Pansy keeps a spotless home, but the blank walls and sparse furnishings are noticeably devoid of warmth, cheer or personality. When she isn’t cleaning, she’s trying to catch up on sleep, complaining about aches, pains and exhaustion. Sometimes she goes out to shop or run errands, only to wind up picking fights with the people she meets: a dentist, a salesperson, a stranger in a parking lot.

Back at home, she unloads on Curtley and Moses about all the indignities she’s been subjected to and the general idiocy of the world around her. Pansy has an insult comedian’s ferocious wit and killer timing. While you wouldn’t necessarily want to bump into her on the street, she makes for mesmerizing, even captivating on-screen company.

Leigh is often described as a Dickensian filmmaker, and for good reason; he’s a committed realist with a gift for comic exaggeration. Like nearly all Leigh’s films, Hard Truths emerged from a rigorous months-long workshop process, in which the director worked closely with his actors to create their characters from scratch. As a result, Jean-Baptiste’s performance, electrifying as it is, is also steeped in emotional complexity; the more time we spend with Pansy, the more we see that her rage against the world arises from deep loneliness and pain.

Leigh has little use for plot; he builds his stories from the details and detritus of everyday life, drifting from one character to the next. Tuwaine Barrett is quietly heartbreaking as Pansy’s son, Moses, who isolates himself and spends his time either playing video games or going on long neighborhood walks. Pansy’s husband, Curtley, is harder to parse; he’s played by the terrific David Webber, with a passivity that’s both sympathetic and infuriating.

The most significant supporting character is Pansy’s younger sister, Chantelle, played by the luminous Michele Austin, another Secrets & Lies alumn. Chantelle could scarcely be more different from her sister: She’s a joyous, contented woman with two adult daughters of her own, and she does everything she can to break through to Pansy. In the movie’s most affecting scene, Chantelle drags her sister to a cemetery to pay their respects to their mother, whose sudden death five years ago, we sense, is at the core of Pansy’s unhappiness.

At the same time, Leigh doesn’t fill in every blank; he’s too honest a filmmaker to offer up easy explanations for why people feel the way they feel. His attitude toward Pansy — and toward all the prickly, outspoken, altogether marvelous characters he’s given us — is best expressed in that graveside scene, when Chantelle wraps her sister in a tight hug and tells her, with equal parts exasperation and affection: “I don’t understand you, but I love you.”

Matthew Muller, the notorious kidnapper whose most infamous crime was detailed in the Netflix documentary “American Nightmare,” appeared Friday in court and pleaded guilty to two additional crimes.

Wearing a brown Santa Clara County jail uniform, Muller, 47, replied with a taciturn series of “yes” answers as Superior Court Judge Cynthia A. Sevely confirmed he was admitting guilt in two home invasions in 2009. In both cases, Muller broke into homes in the early hours, bound his female victims and attempted to drug and sexually assault them.

In total, Muller is now suspected or convicted in at least six violent crimes, beginning when he was 16.

“This extremely dangerous person left a trail of traumatized and terrified victims,” Dist. Atty. Jeff Rosen said. “It took the collective courage of his victims and determined law enforcement officers to stop him. This nightmare is over.”

The Santa Clara charges against Muller came about as a result of the work of an unlikely team of law enforcement officers and the two victims in the Vallejo case, Denise Huskins and Aaron Quinn. Over the last 10 months, the pair said, they obtained clues about the crimes — and even confessions — from Muller before approaching local authorities with jurisdiction in the incidents.

“We knew there was more to this from the beginning, and clearly how things were handled from the beginning led to a lot of errors,” Huskins said in an interview last week. “We didn’t really have anyone in law enforcement that we trusted and we felt were doing this case justice.”

The first Santa Clara County incident took place on Sept. 29, 2009, when a Mountain View woman in her 30s told police she awoke to find a man on top of her. According to a description of the case from the Santa Clara County district attorney’s office, Muller demanded she drink a medicated beverage, then tied her up and said he was going to rape her.

The woman was able to persuade him to stop his assault, according to the district attorney’s office. Before leaving, Muller allegedly told her that she should get a dog for protection.

About three weeks later, on Oct. 18, 2009, a woman in nearby Palo Alto awoke to find Muller on top of her, according to the district attorney’s office. He tied the woman up and forced her to drink Nyquil.

Again, the woman was able to persuade him to stop, according to prosecutors. And again, before leaving, he gave the woman “crime prevention advice,” according to the district attorney’s office.

Last week, Muller was also charged in another new case, in the Contra Costa town of San Ramon, after authorities examined evidence brought to light through Huskins’ and Quinn’s investigative efforts.

After “American Nightmare” came out, Huskins and Quinn were contacted by an unlikely ally: the police chief in the Monterey Bay town of Seaside, Nick Borges. He had seen the documentary and wanted to help.

That Borges had nothing to do with the case didn’t stop him from becoming involved. He invited Huskins and Quinn to speak to law enforcement in Seaside to share their belief that police interrogation methods that focused on Quinn’s guilt had sent the investigation down the wrong road.

Borges also persuaded the detective ultimately responsible for Muller’s arrest, Misty Carausu, to come.

The four met with El Dorado County Dist. Atty. Vern Pierson, who has jurisdiction in the county where Huskins was held captive — and the seeds of a new investigation were planted.

At lunch after the law enforcement conference, Huskins and Quinn told Borges about their frustrations, and a desire to reach out to Muller personally to seek answers. But the couple feared that could present risks. Borges offered to write Muller on their behalf.

Muller wrote back, giving details of other crimes and even legal declarations with confessions.

Armed with the new information, Pierson, who had been working with the FBI and other agencies, in November traveled to Tucson to interview Muller in person. Over two days, according to Pierson, Muller shared more details, including information on a Northern California attack he claimed to have committed when he was 16. That case is still under investigation, Pierson said.

In Huskins’ case, which the Netflix documentary is based on, Muller broke into her Vallejo home in March 2015 and drugged and bound her and her then-boyfriend, Aaron Quinn. Muller blindfolded them with swim goggles and gave them medicine to make them sleepy. He put headphones on Quinn and played recordings designed to make Quinn think he was dealing with more than one kidnapper.

Muller then put Huskins into Quinn’s car and drove off with her, eventually taking her to his family’s cabin in South Lake Tahoe. He held her there for two days and sexually assaulted her, before driving her across California and releasing her in Huntington Beach.

Initially, Vallejo police dismissed Quinn’s account of his girlfriend being spirited away by a kidnapper — or kidnappers — who put headphones on him and made him drink a substance that made him sleepy. Officers interrogated Quinn for hours, brushing aside his story and theorizing he was behind her disappearance.

When Huskins turned up, police grew more suspicious, questioning how a kidnapping victim could reappear hundreds of miles away wearing sunglasses and carrying an overnight bag.

Huskins “did not act like a kidnapping victim,” retired Vallejo Police Capt. James O’Connell later said in a sworn statement.

Police tried to get Huskins and Quinn to turn on each other and admit there had been no crime, offering immunity to whoever flipped first, according to statements from their family members.

Then, police went public with that sentiment. “There is no evidence to support the claims that this was a stranger abduction or an abduction at all,” Police Lt. Kenny Park said in a statement at the time. “Given the facts that have been presented thus far, this event appears to be an orchestrated event and not a crime.”

However, less than three months later, evidence gathered from a June 5, 2015, home invasion robbery in the Bay Area community of Dublin helped authorities link Muller to the kidnapping. That case led authorities and Carausu, the detective, to the Muller family’s South Lake Tahoe cabin, where they found, among other things, Quinn’s computer, goggles and tape with a strand of long blond hair.

Huskins and Quinn, who later married, sued the Vallejo Police Department for defamation and reached a $2.5-million settlement in 2018.

Muller, a Harvard-educated lawyer and former Marine, pleaded guilty in 2016 to kidnapping Huskins. In 2022, he pleaded guilty to additional charges of sexually assaulting her. Until he was transported to Santa Clara County to face the new charges, he was serving his 40-year sentence at a federal prison in Tucson.

Muller is expected to return to Santa Clara County Superior Court on Feb. 21 for sentencing.

In his mid ’70s, it’s only natural that the great Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar should turn his attentions to reflecting on lives lived, and questions of how one wants life to end with his latest film.

But in boiling down and adapting the Sigrid Nunez novel “What Are You Going Through” into “The Room Next Door,” Almodóvar has conjured up the blithe, arid banalities of Woody Allen at his most pretentious. He squanders two Oscar winners and an Emmy winner in a drab, lifeless story in which characters recite passages from poetry and James Joyce from memory and watch Buster Keaton’s silent classic “Seven Chances” as they ponder a planned suicide and melodramatic strings drone on in the score.

All that’s missing are a few mentions of “Mahler”and you’d have yourself a companion piece to any one of a dozen later Allen films, the ones without a laugh or a light moment to recommend them.

Julianne Moore plays Ingrid, a busy, best-selling author of “fictionalized” biographies and non-fiction who learns of an old friend’s cancerous decline from a mutual acquaintance who comes to a book signing.

Martha (Tilda Swinton) was once a combat correspondant. Now she’s in a New York hospital, longing to go home. As booked-up Ingrid — not a “close” friend — sets aside bigger and bigger chunks of her days to take Martha’s calls and visit her once she comes home to her roomy Manhattan flat to recover from her latest treatment, they reminisce over their careers — especially Martha’s.

They talk about “New York in the ’80s,” Martha’s daughter, flashing back to the troubled Vietnam vet father the child never knew and joke about a “shared lover,” and chuckle as they compare “enthusiastic” notes.

Martha also lets on as to how she’s prepped herself for “the end,” and how her “experimental treatment…survival feels almost disappointing.”

When things take a turn, Ingrid is who Martha confides in. She figures that her life of fame won through risk in war zones means “I deserve a good death.” Ingrid’s involvement drifts towards “the ask.” Martha wants to take a “suicide pill.” She wants to do it in Woodstock, in a posher-than-posh AirBnB. And she wants Ingrid in “The Room Next Door” when she does it — for companionship, and for dealing with the legal complexity of what comes after.

Whatever life there was in the Nunez novel seems bleached out of this meandering, claustrophobic melodrama that that Ingrid finds herself trapped in. That “shared lover” (John Turturro) is still in her life, a friend she can confide in and get advice from.

But this extraordinary situation barely takes on the gravitas demanded. Some anecdotes do nothing to illuminate character or this predicament. And the comic possibilities — this is like asking a casual acquaintance of long standing to oh, babysit, dogsit, help you move, co-sign a loan or the like.

Why didn’t Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld ever get around to assisted suicide as an “inconvenience?”

Moore is too good an actress to not let us feel the gut-punch of this turn of events. Swinton, who takes on a cadaverous in the later acts, easily fits our mental picture of a famous female war reporter — flinty, a little butch, blunt about her success and her failings and pragmatic about her goals.

Ingrid’s last goal is to die with dignity, with a writer she trusts perhaps taking an interest in her journals and by extension, her life story. That’s cynical, but letting Ingrid (and the viewer) figure that out had all sorts of dramatic possibilities.

It’s all perfectly high-minded and polished, but all of this could have been treated with more spark than comes across here. The epilogue that comes after a disappointing third act feels like both a stunt and one last let down that a legendary filmmaker delivers in adapting a novel he was either too serious about, or that he didn’t take seriously enough.

Rating: PG-13, suicide, profanity

Cast: Julianne Moore, Tilda Swinton, Alessandro Nivola and John Turturro

Credits: Scripted and directed by Pedro Almodóvar, based on a novel by Sigrid Nunez. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:43