Shirley Henderson

Stan & Ollie review

Brilliant impersonations by Steve Coogan and John C Reilly lift the muted charm of this biopic about their troubled music-hall tour of Britain.

Review: Stan & Ollie

Steve Coogan and John C Reilly excel as famous double act Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.

'Stan & Ollie': London Review

Steve Coogan and John C. Reilly star as one of comedy's greatest-ever double-acts.

London film review: 'Stan & Ollie'

Portraying Laurel and Hardy's final comic collaboration with bittersweet affection, Jon S. Baird's film is a laid-back, gamely performed tribute

Stan & Ollie review

The actors deliver believable performances as the over-the-hill slapstick duo in a solid dramedy about their final tour.

Stan & Ollie review, LFF

Our critic reviews the Laurel and Hardy biopic, starring Steve Coogan and John C Reilly, as it closes out the London Film Festival.

James McAvoy is a very bad cop indeed in Baird's relentlessly grimy, brutal screen adaptation of Irvine Welsh's misanthropic novel. McAvoy's coke-, booze- and sex-addled DS Bruce Robertson is trying to lie and cheat his way up the Edinburgh rozzers' career ladder. It's a powerhouse performance and there's sterling support from the likes of Eddie Marsan and Shirley Henderson but, lacking the warmth and humour of, say, Trainspotting, it's a gruelling experience.

Based upon the novel by John O'Farrell, May Contain Nuts is a light but effective satire upon the middle-class obsession with education.

When it becomes clear that their eldest daughter Molly will never pass the entrance exam to their private school of choice, Alice and David Chaplin resort to extreme measures - Alice will disguise herself as an 11 year old and take the exam for her.

"Nobody notices ugly children," reasons David and Alice is dressed down accordingly, complete with lank hair, thick-framed glasses and stick-on spots. Crucially, for the drama, Shirley Henderson as Alice is actually pretty convincing in the disguise.

May Contain Nuts was the best of the crop of new comedies on TV this week: a strong, almost brilliant cast of comedy actors, rather than comedians; a subject that, while having been done before, was given a pleasantly contemporary makeover. It's the story of the adult who goes back to school, as in Vice Versa or Never Been Kissed. In this case, however, it has been tagged onto that subject for mockery, the middle-class obsession with getting their children into private schools. Though have you noticed that nobody ever makes a drama about how awful state education is? I suspect this is because all scriptwriters used to be teachers. Shirley Henderson is the mother who, because she's teeny-weeny and looks like a woodland creature, decides to take her daugh­ter's entrance exam to get into Chelsea Girls' School. The neighbours are an awful crowd of pushy women and tit-wit husbands. There is one funny scene at a sports day where the mothers attach reins to their children and drag them over the finishing line. Overall, though, it isn't very amusing, or as amusing as it ought to be, and that's not the fault of the plotting, the timing or the acting. It's down to the emphasis, its mission statement; it dithers between satire and comedy.

These are not the same thing, and they don't sit together. Satire is a posh spoof and has a short attention span. This series needed to commit to the humour. It's a shame, because you could tell everyone was gagging to go on and make this really hilarious, but it was stopped by the hand-wringing of its own liberal concerns - and that's one of the reasons there's not one sitcom worth a grin on television. The Tristrams are too frightened, too right-on, too even-handed to laugh at much. Laughter itself is suspicious; people might do it for the wrong reasons, might laugh at the wrong things. Laughter is so raucous, aggressive, judgmental. Isn't it much nicer, more acceptable, to smile and clap?

Pushy, paranoid parents have long been an easy target for send ups. And this two-part adaptation of John O'Farrell's bestselling novel - quite rightly - doesn't cut them any slack. When Alice (played by Shirley Henderson, 44 - and, yes, her age is relevant) and hubby David move to a leafy enclave of South West London, they're quickly informed by a domineering uber-mummy neighbour that the local state school would confine their kids to the intellectual scrap heap and them to social wilderness. Cue Alice pulling on a school uniform (she's no Britney) to sit her daughter's grammar school entrance exams. Un-hilarious, but might raise a wry smile out of parents in similar predicaments.