Jeune Femme (Léonor Sérraille, 2017)

Meet Paula, a 31-year-old Parisienne in a state of manic desperation after being chucked out of her boyfriend's flat with nothing but the clothes on her back and his cat in a box. Mentally unstable, she has no work experience and no friends who trust her, and things look dire until she manages to start rebuilding her life through jobs as a live-in maid and childminder, selling knickers in a shopping centre and forming a few new, more solid friendships.
The first part of Montparnasse Bienvenue, as it's called internationally, is exactly what you might have feared: it's pig-headedly quirky in the belief that being contrary and dissonant always means being refreshing and daring, which is a common affliction in many modish off-centre productions, and particularly widespread in French popular music or American independent cinema. The character is motor-mouthed, self-centred, needy, slovenly and unappreciative of help offered to her. Thankfully that begins to change before it's too late for her redemption and actually turns more mature and upbeat at the same time. It still keeps walking a tightrope between ridiculing and empathising with its heroine, but you do find yourself wanting to see what conclusion is drawn. To an extent, it finally satisfies in the consistently allusory way you might have expected.

6/10

Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool (Paul McGuigan, 2017)

Based on the final months in the life of the Hollywood actress Gloria Grahame, in the last stages of cancer and finding refuge with the family of her English former lover Peter Turner, Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool is, through necessity, elegiac in tone and also has obvious echoes of Sunset Boulevard with a fading star and her accordingly fragile ego. Ageing is a constant theme, not just in the final moments of the story but already in the flashbacks to when she and the far younger Peter were first together. What really elevates a fairly rudimentary structure in the end is Annette Bening's performance as Grahame: at turns coquettish, vain, sardonic and brittle, the character fits her talents and presence like a glove.

6/10

Flushed Away (David Bowers & Sam Fell, 2006)

The final film made as a collaboration between Aardman and DreamWorks, Flushed Away features the voices of Hugh Jackman and an array of British acting heavyweights as an assortment of anthropomorphic rats and frogs, and as usual, adult viewers will enjoy identifying who's who, along with those witty jokes that sail right over the heads of the ostensible target demographic of children. Jackman's character, a flapping posh twit of a rat flushed into the sewers from his palatial Kensington digs, does appear to have been expressly written for Hugh Grant instead, and Bill Nighy as a dim-witted cockney henchman is decidedly leftfield casting, but it's clear they all have fun with it nevertheless, and it zips along breezily enough with a plot involving a toad gangster scheming to kill off the rat population of the sewers while the Jackman rat tries to get back home. All that said, you miss the warmth of Aardman's stop-motion style that the computer animation doesn't quite succeed in reproducing, and so when they finally got back to doing it the old-fashoioned way with Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists in 2012, it was a welcome reminder of what they bring to the animation world that no-one else does.

6/10