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...

Alpha review – Julia Ducournau’s disjointed body horror is an absolute gamma

Cannes film festival
The winner of the Palme d’Or for Titane delivers Cannes’ first true turkey: the tonally inept tale of a girl with a dodgy tattoo and a disease that turns people to marble

Strident, oppressive, incoherent and weirdly pointless from first to last … Julia Ducournau’s new film Alpha has to be the most bewildering disappointment of this year’s Cannes competition; even an honest lead performance from Mélissa Boros can’t retrieve it.

I admit I was agnostic about her much-acclaimed Palme d’Or winner Titane from 2021 but that had an energised purpose lacking in Alpha and Ducournau’s excellent 2016 debut Raw is still easily her best work.

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