PIECES OF A WOMAN PICK OF THE WEEK

Kirby set for awards in a tale of life and death

Vanessa Kirby (far right), best known for her Bafta-winning turn as a younger Princess Margaret in TV’s The Crown, is putting together a promising Hollywood film career, helped by performances in Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw and in Mission: Impossible. Pieces Of A Woman is a very different sort of picture. Directed by the Hungarian film-maker Kornél Mundruczó, it’s a searingly intense drama in which Kirby is nomination-grabbingly good as a young Boston woman whose life threatens to fall apart after a long-planned home birth goes tragically wrong. Shia LaBeouf is almost as good as her construction worker husband, and Ellen Burstyn (above) plays her overbearing mother.