Geoffrey Macnab

Grimsby film review

Sacha Baron Cohen's joyous ride that takes the 'grim' out of Grimsby.

Bill, film review

Elizabethan-era comedy yields as many laughs as it does groans.

The Inbetweeners 2, review

When one gag fails, another immediately follows it until, eventually, the film hits the funny bone.

Four middle-aged friends set out to re-create Alfred Wainwright's coast-to-coast walk from St Bees to Robin Hood's Bay.

They start off in high enough spirits but their anxieties about money, sex, mortality and map reading become increasingly evident. The weather worsens. The friends' drunken antics cease seeming funny.

Torben Betts' screenplay for this engaging, quintessentially British road/rambling movie combines knockabout comedy with surprisingly bleak observations about the way the men's lives have all veered off course.

Frank, film review

The film isn't as funny as might have been expected and the final-reel revelations risk undermining its mystique.

Dignity is in short supply in feeble heist comedy

"What do we have to lose? one character asks in this good-natured but feeble heist comedy. "Our dignity," is the answer. The Love Punch plays like a corny 1970s sitcom and trades shamelessly in clichés about the French.

Why British film studios rarely back comedy

Studios rarely back British comedy films because, despite past success, they don't believe in it, says Geoffrey Macnab.

Screenplay isn't so much offbeat as utterly feeble

Harry Hill's big screen debut is a bit of a misfire.

Passport to a darker view of Ealing

A new season of the classic comedies reveals that they aren't the comfortable representations of Britishness that they are often taken for, says Geoffrey MacNab.

This romantic screwball comedy, set on the mythical Scottish island of Hegg, is clearly intended to evoke memories of Whisky Galore!, I Know Where I'm Going and even Local Hero.

Sadly, the visual magic simply isn't there (perhaps because the film was largely shot on the Isle of Man) and the sub-Ealing eccentricity of the locals seems just a little too forced. Kelly Macdonald is appealing as local lass Katie, a Bridget Jones-like mac-singleton returning to the island after her most recent relationship breaks up.

Here, she meets an arrogant author, James (David Tennant), who is trying to marry Hollywood star Lara Tyler (Alice Eve) away from the prying eyes of the world's media. Tennant does his best in a strangely written role requiring him to be supercilious and charming at the same time. It's a trick that even Cary Grant in his prime would have struggled to pull off.