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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The Union review – Halle Berry and Mark Wahlberg heat up Netflix action flick

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The stars’ rapport helps retain your interest in a preposterous international caper that has something vaguely to do with justice

Like a good covert operation team, everyone involved in the latest in a long line of expensive yet generally forgettable Netflix action flicks is clear on the mission. They know their role, and what they’re being paid for. Mark Wahlberg, playing to type as a downhome blue-collar guy, enters the movie shirtless. Halle Berry, as a veteran intelligence agent, kicks ass while wearing a Catwoman-esque all-leather uniform. JK Simmons, as the head of a covert group of working-class secret agents (hence, the Union), conveys no-nonsense avuncular authority as only JK Simmons can. And Julian Farino, director of such shows as Giri/Haji and Entourage, wrings each of the many combat scenes for snappy but never stressful suspense.

The fictional purpose, besides a vague sense of justice, is never totally clear however. Nothing in The Union is subtle, including its hope that the star power of Wahlberg and Berry will paper over a set-up that feels dubious even by silly caper standards. Berry’s Roxanne is a longtime operative for this secret federal agency (maybe?) of blue-collar workers that goes under the radar, gets by on its unpretentious efficiency and disdains the CIA for its elitism. The film opens with the Union in crisis, as a mission to extract a CIA defector in Trieste goes awry, leaving several agents dead, including Roxanne’s closest partner Nick Faraday (Mike Colter). For quickly stated reasons, a “nobody” is needed to complete the mission. Enter Wahlberg’s Mike, Roxanne’s high school sweetheart.

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