WHO can foretell the future? Guys, go with the beloved woman in your life to watch a film that scarified my emotions by confronting me with reflections of events in my own life.

Morwenna Banks wrote a screenplay that invites laughter and tears in equal doses. Catherine Hardwicke has directed it with no-punches-pulled gusto and delicate sympathy. Drew Barrymore plays Jess, the alarm on her biological clock ringing with increasing intensity. And Toni Collette is Milly, mother of one of each, lifelong besty of Jess, about to confront and endure a predicament that will turn her well-ordered extended family inside out.

For Toni Collette, Milly provides intensity of dramatic demands matching “Lillian’s Story” (1996) or “Japanese Story” (2006). The core issue in Banks’ screenplay is a double mastectomy. Milly is not the only woman to endure such a dreadful predicament. In her decline from a bright career woman, something of a playgirl, into a patient in a hospice after it metastasises to the brain, Collette gives a bravura performance.

Two women entering the cinema at the same moment wondered why I, of unmistakably male appearance, was coming to watch a film that boded to be an unmitigated chick flick. Now they understand.

At all cinemas