A Woman’s Life review – a breezy comedy of midlife crisis and same-sex affair

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Cannes film festival: Léa Drucker gives a bravura performance as a brilliant surgeon whose already chaotic life is further complicated by a same-sex affair with a journalist Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s new film is a hectic, garrulous, breezily agreeable comedy of midlife emotional upheaval, unencumbered by any serious or permanent concern about any of the passion and heartache that it briefly encounters. It’s also a movie that declines to allow its characters to be changed in any way by the excitements and disappointments that life has to throw at them. Léa Drucker carries off the lead with terrifically competent elan; there’s hardly a scene in which she is not interrupted by a call on her mobile, going into bravura walk-and-talk acting on the phone while on the street, arriving at the office or getting into or out of her car. She plays Gabrielle, a brilliant surgeon – what other sort is there in the movies? – who specialises in maxillofacial reconstruction. Gabrielle is battling budg...
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Alien: Romulus review – grungy, back-to-basics instalment goes over same old ground

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Fede Álvarez’s effort is scrappier than Ridley Scott’s grandiose efforts – but everyone involved would have been better employed working on something new

Fede Álvarez’s new instalment in the Alien franchise presents as a younger, grungier, back-to-basics effort, moving away from the grandiose cosmic reach of Ridley Scott’s films Prometheus (from 2012) and, five years later, Alien: Covenant while attempting a return to the downbeat conspiracy paranoia and anti-corporate satire that made the original so unforgettably good. It also, very startlingly, brings back a major character from the 1979 Alien, the actor involved having perhaps signed away CGI image use rights at the time, or conceivably their descendants have been paid a royalty fee.

The resulting movie is a technically competent piece of work; but no matter how ingenious its references to the first film (let down, however, by borrowings from the A Quiet Place franchise) it has to be said that there’s a fundamental lack of originality here which makes it frustrating. There’s isn’t a single person involved, from director to stars to people on craft services who wouldn’t have been better employed actually working on something new.

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