The once famous actress Julia Roth checks into a UK hospital with stage 4 cancer, unable to get a private room, she encounters three women in a similar situation, very different people, united by cancer.

The lack of reviews and seriously low score don't make sense to me, it's a movie that may not be for everyone, but if you know what to expect, it's quite a powerful movie.

The highlight, the acting, there are genuinely some wonderful acting performances in this film, it works so well because of that, the star quality of Andie MacDowell in particular, she's wonderful, and as dazzling as ever.

I'd hoped for a few more laughs, there are a couple, but they're few and far between.

It's very moving, the kind of film that will make you tear up, essentially it shows how different people deal with cancer, clearly there's no right or wrong way.

Well acted, powerful, moving, it's a deep watch, arguably it could have been a little more amusing, but I enjoyed it.

7/10.

Julia Roth (Andie MacDowell) is an older Hollywood actress struggling to make a 'comeback'. She also has colon cancer. She is getting chemotherapy at a clinic outside of London to hide from the public. She is angry to have three roommates during treatment. Mikey (Sally Phillips) is a party girl and troubled mom. Judy (Miriam Margolyes) is a chemo veteran expecting good news. Imaan (Rakhee Thakrar) is a Muslim mother. Nancy (Tamsin Greig) is Julia's fixer manager.

This starts off poorly with a stereotypical clueless entitled Hollywood actress. Andie MacDowell should ask herself if she could ever be this character in real life. Everybody knows what stage 4 means. I get the writing premise of making Julia the worst version of herself so that she can grow. It's not the best part of the movie. The best part is simply four regular women talking about their lives. The movie gets there eventually, but they keep going back to overblown writing. I don't need a baby who survived the holocaust. This movie has its problem. When it's right, it has its heart in the right place.

This is the story of a women who is diagnosed with a serious case of cancer, meets other sufferers, and finds that each of them confronts the disease in a different way, contributing (or maybe not) to the attitude that she herself adopts. It should work well, and maybe it does in the play that this movie was based on (I don't know the play), but here the elements don't connect up very gracefully. Part of the problem, I suspect, is that somebody decided to confine the entire plot to a single day. Maybe even to the hour and a half that the movie takes, although I'm not sure we're supposed to take it that literally. Anyway, the supporting characters don't get very well developed (some are virtually stereotypes), attitudes change too abruptly, and the ending is more like a "we've run out of time" ending than like a comprehensive development out of what's come before. That said, the movie deserves credit for portraying a not entirely sympathetic protagonist and Andie MacDowell deserves credit for putting her across. And Miriam Margolyes extracts the maximum from a part that consists largely of wisecracking and mugging.