Lorna

The world of Lorna is full of couples —they're in her favourite café, at the airport when she goes to pick up her American boyfriend (who, it turns out, never got on the plane), shit, even her cat has a girlfriend.

Lorna wants the kind of romance she reads about in trashy novels, but what she gets is disappointment, bad timing and missed opportunities. But the great thing about this film is that it never makes Lorna out to be desperate or an object of pity — she's a fun, funny 60-year-old woman (played by veteran Filipino actress Shamaine Buencamino with total honesty and charisma), and some of the best scenes come from her conversations (often over Zumba) with her friends, the Botox-obsessed Elvie (Maria Isabel Lopez, who gets the line of the film: "This is not vanity, this is 'loving yourself!'")and family-focused Miriam (Raquel Villavicencio), about love, sex and staying young. The performances, especially from these three and Lorna's handsome 'emo' son Ardie (Felix Roco) carry the film over its sometimes disjointed and awkward plot. The film consistently (perhaps overly) uses the metaphor of love being like being wounded — shot in the heart — but even though Lorna doesn't get her romance novel happy ending, you still come out of it feeling like she is too tough to ever really be beaten.