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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Hold Your Breath review – Sarah Paulson gets lost in scattered horror

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A 1930s-set thriller, about a family battling mysterious dust storms and a possible intruder, is impressively made and acted but falls apart by the end

An award-winning actor playing a fiercely, even frighteningly, protective mother guarding her two children from an unspecified malevolence in a remote home. No, I’m not talking about last month’s Halle Berry horror Never Let Go (is anyone still talking about that one?), but rather this month’s Sarah Paulson horror Hold Your Breath, a film that carries surface similarities (as well as a hopelessly generic rollercoaster-warning-esque title). Like that film, it plays with recent genre trends – a remote, pandemic-suited location and the corrosive effect of mental illness – as well as the use of a life-saving rope tied to the home for those who need to leave. And like that film, it’s also a bit of a mess.

Originally titled Dust, originally set to star Claire Foy and originally intended for a theatrical release, the film arrives at the beginning of Hulu’s month of genre fare, dubbed Huluween. It’s far classier than that categorisation would suggest (especially when compared with films like cheapo evil pumpkin horror Carved), a handsomely made 1930s-set thriller that, unlike most streaming offerings today, also looks like it could stretch to a cinema screen. Added class also comes from Paulson, one of the most reliable small-screen and stage actors we have, who hasn’t really had enough big-screen chances at least not as lead. While Hold Your Breath isn’t quite able to keep up with her, it’s at least a deserving and all-consuming showcase, the actor exhaustively giving it her all.

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