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.”

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