The Bird – review

In this self-consciously art-house movie, freckled French beauty Sandrine Kiberlain looks very strained as Anne, a Bordeaux restaurant employee living alone, rejecting all offers of human contact. She's coping with a terrible secret grief, clues to which are grudgingly fed to us. Eventually she moves towards a form of closure, partly through helping the eponymous pigeon. When Anne goes for a big weep at the cinema, she has the good taste to see Mizoguchi's The Life of Oharu , one of the greatest films about a woman suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune in silence.