'Couture' Review
- Juli Horsford
- 1 day ago
- 2 min read
Release Date: 06/26/26 [Cinemas]
Genre: Drama.
MPAA: Rated R.
Distributor: Vertical.
The Verdict: A Maybe
Couture follows the story of four women as they prepare for a show in Paris during French fashion week. Maxine (Angelina Jolie) is an indie filmmaker who is creating a short film for a fashion house. She works on the film with Ada (Anyier Anei), a young Sudanese model battling through the inexperience that comes from her first gig. Angèle (Ella Rumpf) is a makeup artist who longs to be a writer. And then there’s Christine (Garance Marillier), a seamstress working on her first solo dress. The four women come from different backgrounds and on the surface have nothing in common other than preparing for the show.
The movie works best when it’s focused on Maxine, who is finally seeing some career success while navigating a divorce and attempting to parent her kid long-distance. Then she gets hit with a breast cancer diagnosis that sends her life spiraling. Much of why the movie works is thanks to Angelina Jolie who outperforms pretty much everyone on screen. The best scenes pair her with Vincent Lindon (he portrays the doctor who delivers the unfortunate news of Maxine’s diagnosis). The two trade lines like pros—Jolie with heartaching displays of disbelief and sorrow and Lindon with the heavy, furrowed brow that inevitably comes for doctors who must deliver this type of news. It’s impossible to ignore Jolie’s personal emotional connection to those scenes as she underwent a preventative double mastectomy in 2013 and lost both her grandmother and mother to cancer.
The other three characters suffer from being severely underdeveloped. Christine only gets a few lines of dialogue over the course of the one-hour and forty-six minute runtime. Ada is pursuing modeling despite not being sure it’s what she really wants to do. Angèle is slightly more compelling as she fights for makeup gigs to pay her bills and tries to pursue writing on the side. But the script from writer and director Alice Winocour doesn’t really do any of them justice. So when Jolie is missing from the screen, the movie sags. But Couture isn’t a total loss. Passion comes through in every scene, Jolie shines, and the competing storylines showcase the shared understandings and minute connections that make life worth living.
