Film Reviews by None

This latest Dan Brown adaptation has the same spectacular locations but more of a storyline and an unexpected twist. I had thought the first two were laughably poor as films but this was better.

First of all, this is an outstanding performance from Penelope Cruz in this subtitled Spanish film. As Magda she's the central character who is left by her husband, discovers she has breast cancer and needs a mastectomy, discovers she has untreatable secondary spread to her lungs, becomes pregnant by her new partner and gives birth to a daughter before dying a few seconds later. In this process she is surrounded by three men who love her. These are her new recently bereaved lover, her gynecologist (whose relationship with her does stray on the side of unprofessional) and her football star in the making son. All of them perpetuate her memory by caring for the baby daughter. Even the relationship with her ex husband seems fairly amicable. There's also a strange theme running through of the image of a little blonde Russian girl who her gynaecologist fails to go to adopt and who comes to symbolise her wish for a daughter and gives her name to the baby. So in terms of plausibility, this film's got nothing and it is seriously schmaltzy, even having songs by her gynecologist in there. But in its defence this film does deal with the fairly taboo area of breast cancer and terminal illness without compromise and without being a tear-jerker in the process.

Its an enjoyable and original romance where Greta Gerwig plays Maggie,an intense young New York academic who isn't good at long term relationships but decides she wants to have a child and bring her up as a single mother. To achieve this aim she persuades a socially inept but mathematically gifted acquaintance to provide a semen sample which she then uses to try to inseminate herself. This becomes complicated by ending up on the same day in bed with a married colleague (Ethan Hawke). Unexpectedly he leaves his wife (Julianne Moore) for her and brings his two children along and a child is born to her in due course. But the relationship cools as the years pass, he becomes preoccupied with writing a novel and she ends up simply looking after him and his children. Hence Maggie's plan to get him back to his wife and leave her as the single parent she'd always intended to be, one that eventually succeeds. Greta Gerwig takes on her well established persona to great effect. Making artificial insemination by donor the plot is pretty unorthodox, although it does become rather predictable as it goes on, but its well paced with a surprisingly open ending and a nice line in the ridiculousness of academic pretensions.