Short Cuts – movies currently screening

THE BOOKSHOP

★★★½

PG, 113 minutes

Spanish writer-director Isabel Coixet takes on the job of adapting Penelope's Fitzgerald's satirical antidote to quaint English village life. Some of Fitzgerald's sharp edges have been planed away in this story of widow Florence (Emily Mortimer) who takes on a local queen bee to set up the town's first bookshop. Bill Nighy is one of the village's eccentrics, shambling artfully through the action as the reclusive Mr Brundish, Florence's best customer. SH

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AURORE

★★★★

M, 89 minutes

Agnes Jaoui, has one of the roles of her life, as a woman of 50 for whom life is spinning too fast. In quick succession, she loses her job and angers her two daughters. On the plus side she runs into a man she was madly in love with at 18. The film offers blazing proof that stories about life, at any age, can be smart, funny, engaging and revealing. PB

LIFE OF THE PARTY

★★★

M, 105 minutes

Melissa McCarthy has swallowed ambition in favour of husband Dan (Matt Walsh)✓ and daughter Maddie (Molly Gordon). But when Dan runs off with another woman, Deanna (McCarthy) follows Maddie to university to follow her passion for archaeology and becomes den mother, empowering her sorority sisters. While it's not McCarthy's best film, it does pack a message about young women's self worth. JW

ON BODY AND SOUL

★★★★

R, 116 minutes

Endre (Geza Morcsanyi) is finance manager at an abattoir. He is 50-ish with a withered arm that makes some things hard – such as eating. Maria (Alexandra Borbely) is his new inspector of meat. She is about 30, with a personality so peculiar that her co-workers torment her. Ildico Enyedi's film is a love story in which two deeply isolated people find the will to love, and one of the most startling, original and poised films of the year. PB

TULLY

★★★½

M, 96 minutes

Film collaborators Diablo Cody and Jason Reitman are pretty much back in form with Tully, the story of a woman under seige. Charlize Theron stacked on the kilos for the role of Marlo, a mother experiencing a post-partum daze as she looks after a newborn and two other children, one of them suffering behavioural problems. With the arrival of the title character (Mackenzie Davis) life changes in ways Marlo could never have imagined. It's largely a one-woman show but Theron, for all those extra kilos, has no difficulty rising to the occasion. SH

I FEEL PRETTY

★★★

M, 110 minutes

Amy Schumer steps into a minefield with I Feel Pretty – especially in an era when any woman who breaks the mould in Hollywood is forced to pay the price. Certainly, the last thing to expect from this kind of fluffy mainstream comedy – the joint directing debut for veteran chick flick writers Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein (Never Been Kissed) – is a coherent feminist statement. Still, the film qualifies as a genuine pop event: a screwball update of Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth, starring Schumer as Renee, a klutzy office worker obsessed with what her life might be if she were "undeniably pretty". JW

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