Pieces of a Woman is what happens when rich, entitled white folk have bad shit happen to them. Do they take responsibility for their bad decisions? Ha! Of course they don’t. They blame anything, everything and everyone they can.

The film begins with a technically virtuosic sequence where the lead character Martha (Vanessa Kirby) goes into labour. She’s got an awesome apartment, has a studly boyfriend played by the trainwreck of a human being that is Shia LaBeouf and has decided to give birth at home. Fair enough. That’s a perfectly reasonable decision. However, it’s also a risky decision. If you give birth at home, you’re exposing yourself to danger. You’re like a tightrope walker without a safety net. If something bad happens, you’re in trouble.

Anyone who’s made this decision should be completely honest with themselves. They should know that the potential for tragedy is far greater. But of course these assholes just want to have a beautiful home birth, listen to some shitty music on Spotify and stay out of that icky hospital where people can actually help them.

The opening sequence is well choreographed but is ruined by the acting of Vanessa Kirby. She doesn’t look like she’s in labour; she looks like she’s high. Or that she’s chugged a couple of bottles of wine. I’ve seen so many labour sequences in movies and television shows over the years and the acting from her is one of the worst. The smoke and mirrors of the shooting can’t disguise shitty acting.

The best acting comes from Molly Parker as the poor midwife who has to deal with these pampered douchebags. The creeping dread of this complicated labour is very subtly conveyed ,and she does her absolute best in difficult circumstances, but you can tell that she’s shitting bricks.

Despite some difficulties, the baby is born. All seems well. Shia LaBeouf even cracks out an old film camera and begins snapping away. Who the fuck does this? His baby is two seconds old and his first thought is to grab a camera. He doesn’t take a minute to enjoy the moment. He doesn’t hug his wife. He doesn’t use his eyes to gaze upon the wonder of his newborn baby. No, he snaps away with an old film camera. I don’t know why, but the film camera part of it makes it worse for me. I absolutely love film, but are you telling me that this roughneck is into film photography? Get the fuck out of here.

Five seconds later the baby begins to struggle to breath and turns blue. The assholes don’t notice this but the poor midwife does and tries her best to intervene. An ambulance soon arrives but it’s too late. Bet you this wouldn’t have happened in a hospital.

Is that too blunt of a statement? Is that too reductive? Is it too insensitive? But for the whole movie I was waiting for someone to mention this. Martha’s mother kind of broaches the subject, but it’s only in the final sequence that the question is explicitly asked. And it’s asked by the midwife’s lawyer. But the subject is quickly dismissed.

Instead Martha, upset by the questioning, gets to have a break. When she comes back, she asks if she can address the court directly. ‘This is highly unusual’ everyone mutters, which is movie code for ‘what’s about to follow is implausible BS’. So Martha addresses the court and makes a little speech. She says that what happened wasn’t the midwife’s fault. Everyone watching is meant to cry rivers of fat tears. I, however, was fuming. So this rich asshole gets to pardon the poor peasant? The person who was trying to act responsibly and do their best in difficult circumstances? How wonderful. How heartwarming. Yes, you’ve only put this woman through hell. You’ve only put her through months of stress and agony. You’ve only potentially taken her freedom away from her because things didn’t go perfectly. How dare you. And how dare this fucking film. The midwife doesn’t even get to say anything. She just gets to look worried and sad and then grateful. In reality she would despise Martha. The shit that Martha has put her through. Surely her professional reputation is in the toilet because of this. Who would hire her now?

So no, the ending didn’t warm the cockles of my heart. In fact, my rage only intensified during the final coda.

The ending has a child walking through a vast field and then climbing a tree. A woman calls the child and of course it’s Martha. They then walk hand in hand back to a large house. Does it make me a bad person that my sympathy is vastly eroded when the characters are disgustingly wealthy? Try losing a child when you don’t have a rich mother to bail you out. Try losing a child when you have to deal with bullshit from insurance companies. Try losing a child when your boyfriend isn’t a coked up manchild and yet you still separate anyway because the grief is too great.

The depiction here of Martha’s boyfriend Sean, played by Shia LaBeouf, is remarkably simplistic and one note. He cries a little bit but he’s mostly filled with blind rage. In one scene, not long after the incident at the beginning, he bullies his girlfriend into trying to have sex. They’re sitting on the couch and he grabs her hand and puts it on his penis. And then even though she isn’t physically or emotionally ready, forces himself on her. It’s essentially a rape scene.

As well as being a rapist asshole, Sean is also a complete moron. In one scene he spews the following toe-curling line: ‘Why are you trying to disappear my child?’ This is in response to his girlfriend trying to take apart the baby’s room. Who talks like this? Did he suddenly turn into Yoda? And Sean then goes on to say that he ‘misses’ his child? You mean the child that was alive for about ten seconds and the child that you loved so much you had to crack out your film camera for? You might be sad that your child didn’t get to live. You might wonder what kind of amazing future your child might have had if circumstances had been different. But you miss them? It’s like what someone would say if they’re trying to convince themselves they have emotions.

After this nonsense, Sean begins an affair with Martha’s cousin, who, would you believe it, is a lawyer who’s going to represent Martha in court. Why are Sean and Martha’s cousin doing this? Couples fall apart after trauma for a variety of reasons. Why reduce it to some soap opera level bullshit? Him and the cousin even start doing some coke after they have sex in her office, which is tacky as fuck.

I also find the depiction of the cousin completely unbelievable. She’s dowdy and shy looking and yet she’s supposed to be some fearsome lawyer. She also keeps on spouting disgusting shit about how the midwife must pay.

But back to Sean’s character. There was one scene of domestic abuse that was so over the top and ripe with student-level symbolism that I couldn’t help but laugh. Martha has gone out to a club and flirted with a man to communicate her intense suffering. Because this is what always has to happen in films of this ilk. It’s not enough to just suffer. People have to suffer beautifully while flirting with other beautiful people because they’re so damn sad. And then she comes home to her boyfriend and they get into an argument. She’s smoking on the couch and he throws a yoga ball in her face. She doesn’t say a thing. She doesn’t even look mad. She just stubs out the cigarette on the sofa (to communicate her smouldering rage) while her feet rest on the deflating yoga ball (to communicate that she’s sinking) as withered plants and flowers surround her (to communicate the death of their relationship). We then cut to a shot of an unfinished bridge (to communicate the gulf that exists between them). All of this happens in about twenty seconds. You couldn’t lay it on thicker if you tried.

But Sean isn’t even the most heinous character in this movie. That dubious distinction would go to Martha’s mother played by Ellen Burstyn. At first she seems like a harmless rich old lady. She even buys Martha and Sean a new car. But as the film develops we see what a bitter, twisted old fuck she is. Everything that has happened is the fault of the midwife, and the midwife must pay for her mistakes. Because isn’t that what rich people do? Rather than look at things from every perspective; rather than accept the complexity of life, there always has to be someone to blame when things don’t go the way they want. Because they’re rich. Nothing bad is meant to happen to rich people. Infant deaths and things of that nature only exist in the realm of the poor. So it must be the midwife’s fault. And she must go to jail because I don’t get to hold MY granddaughter.

In one scene Martha’s mother relates her strength of character. She says how she was born during the Second World War and how her mother would have to scrounge for food in order to survive. She barely had enough food to produce milk. In fact, people told her to get rid of the baby; that the baby wasn’t going to make it. But then to prove her strength, she held the baby upside down and the baby raised her head. Martha’s mother tells this story as a pep talk. What? So if I was an underfed baby and I still had the strength to raise my head, you should be able to get over your grief? That’s bonkers.

And Martha’s mother relates this story like she can personally remember it. Like she can remember being that baby. She doesn’t tell it like ‘my mother told me I raised my head’. No, it’s like she can remember being a few weeks old, which of course is complete and utter horseshit. It also speaks to a deeper, most insidious attitude in general. Well, if I can overcome malnutrition why can’t all those starving children in Ethiopia too? Well, if I can become stinking rich why can’t all these poor people as well? If only people would pull themselves up by their bootstraps like me.

To further illustrate this woman’s character, or lack thereof, she solves the problem of Martha’s boyfriend Sean by throwing money at him. Sean has a pretty good job so how much money would it cost to make him disappear? $10,000? $50,000? $200,000? I’m guessing it’s a bonkers amount, seeing as the check does the intended job. But again, how disgusting is this person? People are just objects or problems to be dealt with and disposed of.

Despite this, once the trial is over, we’re again meant to feel warm and fuzzy when Martha has dinner with her mother at some fancy restaurant. Martha’s mother is becoming forgetful but Martha sympathetically holds her hand. Am I meant to give a shit? I hope her mother forgets everything. I hope she forgets about her daughter. I hope she forgets herself. I hope she forgets every fond memory in her head. But most of all, I hope she doesn’t get to enjoy her granddaughter.

When it was announced that Paul Greengrass was making a movie called News of the World, I legitimately thought he was making a gritty, documentary-style expose of the demise of the British tabloid of the same name; a probe into the phone hacking scandal. Instead it turned out that he was making a Tom Hanks western. I was intrigued.

I really shouldn’t have been. News of the World is hamstrung by a dull, stodgy, cliche-ridden screenplay and pantomime villains. It also features the worst action sequences of any Paul Greengrass movie and is devoid of any excitement or tension. At best, it feels half-hearted; at worst it’s completely inept.

The story centers on Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd, played by Tom Hanks, who goes from town to town with a handful of newspapers and tells the locals what’s going on in the world. He has all the showmanship of a blind, wet dog. If I went to one of these readings, I’d want my money back, such is the excruciating boredom of him relating local news in a tortuously slow and important manner.

Things pick up when Kidd stumbles upon a bloodbath in a forest. There he finds a young girl named Johana who only speaks Kiowa and German. He tries his best to arrange a safe passage home for her but no one can help. So it falls to him to take her home.

You can immediately guess what’s going to happen. They don’t speak the same language and the old man and the kid don’t like each other. He resents her and she’s scared and angry. So something terrible is going to happen, right? He’s going to abandon her in the desert or she’s going to slit his throat while he sleeps? Who am I kidding? Of course they’re not. They’re going to slowly bond and develop a long, lasting affection for one another and share each other’s cultures and become friends on Facebook and... Sorry, I’ve nodded off.

It might be an incredibly predictable trajectory for the movie, but the relationship between Kidd and Johana is actually by far the best thing in the movie. Tom Hanks and Helena Zengel are both excellent. Yes, this movie hardly stretches Hanks’s acting range but he’s still a marvelous actor. It’s just a crying shame that he has so little to work with.

The point at which I knew that this film was going to be a crushing failure was when Kidd and Johana encounter a gang of outlaws who want to buy the girl. The thought alone is terrible. We all know what the leering criminals want out of her and what they’ll do. So when Kidd and Johana skip town and a chase ensues, a tense, white knuckle thriller of a scene should follow, shouldn’t it?

It should, but it doesn’t. This paedo posse is populated by complete blithering morons. They trap Kidd and Johana atop a rocky hill and begin the most boring shoot out in modern times. There’s zero tension, zero excitement and zero intensity. The dialogue basically amounts to ‘Oooh, I’m gonna get you!’ And then we begin with the whole nonsense of ‘You can join us!’ Oh, will Kidd betray Johana and join the paedo posse? What do you think, dear reader?

The hilltop shootout also suffers the ignominy of having the worst effects shot since Legolas Greenleaf mounted a horse by levitating like a jerky clusterfuck of pixels in The Two Towers. Kidd crushes one of his foes by pushing a massive boulder down the hill. Pretty simple, eh? Shouldn’t be too difficult for the practical effects department. Instead, for some reason only known to the filmmakers, they decide to use a CGI boulder, and by god it looks terrible. Like Legolas it looks like it comes from a bad video game.

So this garbage shot takes place and then we still have to suffer the most boring game of cat and mouse in decades. Of course Kidd manages to kill the dunderhead but not before we’ve had a nap or two.

What makes this scene all the more bewildering is that we know that Greengrass is an excellent action director. The Bourne movies, United 93, Captain Phillips and 22 July are all evidence of that. It’s like he’s consciously tried to get away from the ‘shaky cam’ tag but has failed to successfully adapt to a new style.

Once this sequence is over we almost immediately stumble upon more stupidity. Our heroes are riding along a path when some ne'er-do-wells emerge from the bushes. Apparently they’re a militia group who are looking to keep the area clear of outsiders. In reality, they just want to enslave the local population and amass wealth.

The leader of this group is so overwhelmingly narcissistic that he’s produced his own newspaper. This paper includes drawings of the leader doing all kinds of important things that he’s obviously never done, like curing leprosy and feeding orphans. They’re so cheesy that I half expected that one of the pictures would be of The Last Supper with the leader standing in for Jesus Christ.

The leader of this group gets Kidd to read this self-published rag to the local townsfolk. Kidd refuses and instead reads from another paper. The story he recounts is of a group of coal miners who turn against their harsh leader. Oh, I wonder what Captain Kidd is up to here?

The writing in this scene is so clunky and awkward that I felt sorry for Tom Hanks having to spew this claptrap. That this story could so quickly and effectively rile up this group of people is just preposterous. And would you believe it, but Kidd and Johanna use the commotion to escape from the militia, until of course the leader shows up as they try to mount their wagon. But after taking an age to shoot Captain Kidd (of course), the leader gets shot by Johanna. And then when another bad guy turns up to shoot Johanna, a kid shows up at the last second to save the day. It’s all so cliched and predictable that it almost makes you want to weep.

The kid who saves the day is a young man, and the actor who plays him is just awful. He has a weird, creepy vibe that makes you hope that he disappears quickly. And thankfully, he does.

Eventually Captain Kidd returns Johanna to her extended family. Her uncle, who is a complete asshole, is immediately whining and complaining and saying that she needs to work (get a job!). He’s only known her for ten seconds!

Of course the extended family treat Johanna like shit and of course Captain Kidd, after a tearful excursion to his wife's grave, eventually adopts her. And they go around reading the newspaper to everyone, and have an awesome time doing it. But the film is so poorly written and poorly constructed that I couldn’t give a crap. Tom Hanks and Helena Zengel do their best but no one could make this crap work. It’s such a disappointing film given the talent behind and in front of the camera.