This is pure comfort cinema: soft, warm and slightly woolly. Marina (Anna Friel)
and Holly (Michelle Williams) are best friends whom we follow from 1973 to the present
day, and the spot-on performances of the two stars lift this Brit chick flick immensely.
Friel's brittle bitch stays just the right side of Ab Fab, while Williams (best known as
the apple-pie temptress Jen in Dawson's Creek) is a revelation as her dumpier chum.
There's some merciless lampooning of student literary theorising, too, and Kyle MacLachlan
puts in a terrific turn as the mild-mannered American tutor who inadvertedly seduces them
both. A word also for Trudie (Mrs Sting) styler as Marina's mother, a loveable aging brass
who plies the girls with endless walnut whips and filthy anecdotes.