In Your Hands, review - Telegraph 15 cert, 85 min; dir Lola Doillon, starring Kristin Scott Thomas, Pio MarmaÏ As sure as Wimbledon, caped crusaders, and the utter lack of acceptable weather, July brings counter-programming to the art-houses, in the shape of Kristin Scott Thomas doing intense things in French. The films vary in quality and theme - Leaving was a good, bitter sliver of an adultery drama, Sarah's Key a convoluted, Holocaust-themed mystery - but a rigorously switched-on central performance is pretty much a given. She has her rivals: Juliette Binoche crumples more profoundly; Tilda Swinton aches more exquisitely; Isabelle Huppert goes more nuts. Still, Scott Thomas rules the roost if we're looking at inner burn, at the fury that always seems to be snacking on her marrow. If emotional masochism ever became a four-a-side team sport, this quartet would never lose. In Your Hands enlists its star as Anna Cooper, a childless, unattached surgeon in the obstetrics department of a Paris hospital. She begins it running down the street in a man's T-shirt, locking herself in her apartment, and listening to a week's worth of answerphone messages. No one's to know that she's just been kidnapped by an aggrieved loner called Yann (Pio Marmaï) and locked in a windowless room for reasons even she doesn't grasp, or not at first. No one - least of all the policemen to whom she gives a highly censored version of her ordeal - has a real inkling of how it panned out, but you could show them Last Tango in Paris, or anything else by Bertolucci, and leave the rest to the imagination. Unfolding mainly in a long, cheerless flashback, Lola Doillon's movie could have been stronger: it's a brittle, single-track business, and a seemingly cramped context for Scott Thomas to strut her stuff in. What's impressive, then, is how formidably the actress does manage to wrest control of the script, forging a character whose decisions feel headlong, instinctive, and surprising even to herself. In a world where Anna Cooper had seen a few more Kristin Scott Thomas vehicles, and didn't seem shut away in her own wholly credible head-space, she might have known exactly what to do.