Singing satirist Anna Russell placed the French chanson in her category of songs for singers "with no voice but tremendous artistry". Mezzo Karen Cargill has tremendous artistry but also a very great voice indeed, a mysterious gift which makes her one in a thousand, and also rather good French (put that down to Scotland's "Auld Alliance, perhaps).

French director Michel Hazanavicius made a name for himself with his OSS 117 spy spoofs, Nest of Spies (2006) and Lost in Rio (2009), set in the Fifties and Sixties respectively and starring Jean Dujardin as a somewhat idiotic and prejudiced secret agent. But it was with The Artist in 2011 that he hit the jackpot, marrying his gift for period recreation with a story of genuine depth and warmth.

In bronze, marble, stone and plaster, as far as the eye can see, powerful figures and fragments – divine and human, mythological and real; athletes, soldiers and horses alongside otherworldly creatures like Centaurs – stride out. They pose, re-pose, twist, turn and captivate as that 19th century sculptor of genius, Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), encountered and absorbed, with such sensual pleasure, the art of antiquity.

Divorce proceedings turn sour in this devastating debut from writer/director Xavier Legrand. Using the full palette of human behaviour, Custody expertly balances high tension and grounded realism to create a timely and lingering film.

Activism is back with a vengeance in our parlous political age, so what better time to welcome 120 BPM as a reminder of an impulse that has never truly gone away?

I Got Life!, originally released in France as Aurore, is a lovely, funny low-budget comedy that should definitely appeal to female movie-goers with a fondness for quirky, feisty women d’un certain age. It’s the kind of film that one would probably go to with a girlfriend rather than a male date… even though it would do middle-aged men a world of good to see it.

Fabulous Agnès Jaoui, who also collaborated on the script with director Blandine Lenoir, stars as Aurore, an amicably divorced mother of two adult daughters, living in La Rochelle. She’s going through the menopause with annoying hot flushes and the realisation that she’s become invisible to men, even ones her own age, who seek out younger girlfriends.

The bar she works at has been taken over by a boorish new propriétaire who can’t be bothered to call her by her real name and insists that she is now Samantha and should be confined behind the bar. She needs a new job and a new lover, especially as her older daughter has just announced that she’s expecting a baby and the younger one is besotted with a selfish young oaf and leaving home. Aurore and her gutsy gal pal Mano (Pascale Arbillot, pictured below with Jaoui) aren’t willing to embrace sexless grandmotherly status just yet and they embark on amorous adventures involving old school mates (twinkly Thibault de Montalembert) and strangers. It’s fascinating to see everyday body fascism towards middle-aged women being tackled head on by French filmmakers – France is after all the country famous not only for its flirtatious culture but a nation which performs five times more bariatric surgery operations per year than the UK. It’s lovely too to witness a light-touched fight-back at grotesque stereotypes in a mainstream French comedy. While I Got Life! is not always entirely credible in its plotting – there’s one lucky coincidence too many and a perhaps over-hasty happy ending – this is still a highly enjoyable little gem of a movie.

Nina Simone belts out "I Got Life" on the soundtrack, there’s a cute reference to the William Wellman classic male-female grooming movie A Star is Born and clips of the late feminist anthropologist Françoise Héritier woven in. It’s interesting to compare I Got Life! with the over-engineered movies such as The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel that the British turn out or last year's frenetic Debra Winger vehicle, The Lovers. There’s a freshness and everyday comic realism to I Got Life! which puts those films to shame. It’s not as ambitious a piece of filmmaking stylistically as 20th Century Women which tackled similar themes, but it is warmly recommended.

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@saskiabaron

Overleaf: watch the trailer for I Got Life!