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

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...

Lollipop review – impassioned, head-butting indictment of the social-care system

Edinburgh international film festival
Informed by her own experiences, Daisy-May Hudson’s portrait of a woman trying to regain custody of her kids is surprisingly even-handed

Daisy-May Hudson is the British film-maker who in 2015 made a fiercely personal documentary about homelessness: her own. Half Way told the story of how she, her mum and her 13-year-old sister lost their home and then found themselves in the bureaucratic nightmare of hostels and halfway houses, and her camera showed the audience every excruciating moment.

Now Hudson has developed these ideas as a fiction feature in the tradition of Ken Loach’s Ladybird Ladybird and Cathy Come Home. It’s an impassioned, humane and urgently performed drama, a vivid look at what it’s like to be reduced to screaming anguish by the system – as well as what it’s like to work for the system, and to be the brick wall getting screamed at.

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