SECONDSCREEN
Finding Your Feet (12A) ★★★ is another of those modestly budgeted British films aimed at an older audience and, again, it is very much a mixed bag. On the plus side, Imelda Staunton and Celia Imrie are lovely as two long-estranged sisters thrown together when Sandra (Staunton) discovers that her about-tobe-knighted, about-to-retire chief constable husband has been cheating on her.
In the first of several contrived plot developments, this grande dame of leafy suburbia moves in with her free-spirited, council-flat-dwelling, lifelong spinster sister Bif (Imrie, pictured).
Bif is everything Sandra isn’t – outgoing, life-embracing and popular with the ageing chaps at her local dance class, particularly narrow-boat-owning Charlie (Timothy Spall). Goodness, is Sandra about to learn some sort of important life lesson?
It’s harmless stuff but the humour is hit-and-miss, the screenplay formulaic and the whole thing goes on about half an hour too long. Even the dance scenes are uninspiring.
Dark River (15) ★★ is the sort of tale of farming folk that makes Thomas Hardy’s Wessex novels look like light comedy. Alice, played by Ruth Wilson, returns to the dilapidated Yorkshire family farm after the death of her father. A successful shepherd and shearer in her own right, she wants to make a fresh start and take on the tenancy.
But her aggressive, taciturn brother Joe (Mark Stanley) has other ideas. Dark secrets, general unhappiness and big performances abound in an unrelenting misery-fest that leaves you with the feeling that writer-director Clio Barnard is trying too hard.
Treat of the week, particularly if you’re old enough to remember the 1976 Winter Olympics, is The Ice King (12A) ★★★★, an evocative and lovingly assembled documentary that tells the extraordinary and sad story of John Curry, 1976 Olympic gold medallist, the most graceful male figure skater Britain has ever produced and still one of very few openly gay athletes to have competed – and won – at the very highest level. You’ll have forgotten how wonderful he was.