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...

Lore review – Brit-horror anthology tells its gruesome stories around the campfire

Richard Brake is well cast as the host for this portmanteau of grisly yarns, where the girls’ tales are made of stronger stuff than the boys’

Anthology films are notoriously hard to pull off but, though it starts shakily, this low-budget British portmanteau has an ace in the hole: horror stalwart Richard Brake, whose grimy leer is normally a kitemark of something at least halfway chilling. (Hopefully his dental hygiene is better in real life.) In Lore, he is a Cryptkeeper-style host for four hikers out for an “immersive” experience in the wilds; informing them that they have pitched their tents above the site of some ancient evil, this campfire compere bids them bring forth their most blood-chilling yarns.

The boys, Mark (Dean Bone) and Dan (Miles Mitchell), think basic: the former trots out a warehouse runaround with gang fugitive Daniel (Andrew-Lee Potts) encountering a saw-toothed monster and a last-gasp psychological twist. Dan offers a boilerplate piece of gothic haunted house, in which a revenant ballerina (who has seen a few too many J-horror films) torments a mother and son. The horror mechanics in the latter, especially, are competently executed, but for a film called Lore there’s a basic lack of backstory or mystery in either.

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