The narrative is suffused with subtle yet piquant moral commentary.

| Aug 8, 2018

What saves this from being a dull downer is the lightness of touch in the direction and performances, the spontaneity of the dialogue as characters discuss dress designs or household expenditure.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 12, 2018

A respectful adaptation, yet one that fails to translate the intensity of Maupassant's writing.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 12, 2018

The director Stéphane Brizé does some lovely work with non-chronological flashbacks and flash-forwards, but the deadening sense that we know exactly where this is going (hint: not up) is never quite undone.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 12, 2018

Whirlwind is something of a watchword for this inventive melodrama, which condenses into some 27 years into two hours, using daringly succinct, precise scenes, brilliantly spliced by editor Anne Klotz.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 11, 2018

A Fascinating period drama, made with a deft hand and an assured style. Beautifully made with some the impeccable lead performances.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 11, 2018

It doesn't make for cheerful viewing but, in its own downbeat way, A Woman's Life makes absorbing filmmaking.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 10, 2018

It's marvellously done, with mournful aquatint colours, spare music (on what sounds like a spinet) and elliptical tableaux that keep you creatively guessing.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 10, 2018

Credit to Stéphane Brizé for an impressive piece of filmmaking with a refreshingly contemporary approach.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 10, 2018

Complex, poised and beguilingly earthy. Stephane Brizé's decade-spanning epic is a sensitively performed, memorably fragmentary look at one woman undone by the feckless men in her life.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 9, 2018

Guy de Maupassant's first novel, about a trusting French noblewoman who follows her husband and then her grown son into financial ruin, gets a slow, sensual, impressionistic treatment from director Stéphane Brizé.

| Jun 15, 2017

We warm to Jeanne's plight not because it is so relatable or familiar, but rather because every turn feels so vivid and so enveloping.

| May 11, 2017

Here's a rare period drama that contrives to minimize the gap between its events and our experience of watching them. Notwithstanding its frocks and bonnets, it feels as much a present-tense story as any film set in our own time.

| May 8, 2017

Brizé pays more attention to the tasteful costumes and the alluring settings than to the drama or the images.

| May 8, 2017

The rare period piece that feels observed rather than pretended, Stéphane Brizé's "A Woman's Life" finds the prolific French filmmaker applying his ruggedly naturalistic style to some very different source material.

| Original Score: B | May 7, 2017

The woman, Jeanne (Judith Chemla)... which director Stéphane Brizé and his co-writer, Florence Vignon, follow for 27 years from the time Jeanne is 20, is unavoidably representative. Her afflictions are both symbolic and intensely personal.

| Original Score: B- | May 5, 2017

The power of Mr. Brizé's film - and of Ms. Chemla's quietly volcanic performance - lies partly in the way ordinary disasters erupt in Jeanne's life, at once challenging her passivity and emphasizing her helplessness.

| May 4, 2017

A Woman's Life frustrates because it's neither entertaining nor illuminating to watch a character passively absorb constant misery.

| Original Score: C | May 3, 2017

What lingers from this revelatory life is that compact world Jeanne inhabits, and how each tragedy, each happiness, and each everyday gesture together accrete into the woman we discover again and again.

| May 2, 2017

The camerawork, production design and costumes are all impressive, though the technical credit that most deserves a shout-out is the makeup and hair by Garance Van Rossum.

| May 1, 2017