Brian Viner

Review: The Favourite - cheeky and hilarious

All this bawdiness and chicanery would be entertaining enough, but it is given a raucous spin by Lanthimos, working from a very funny original screenplay.

Early Man is a joy even if you don't like football

The clever people at Pixar are also wonderful at what they do, but their new production is so slick and clever that it doesn't make you hug yourself with joy. Early Man does.

Mindhorn review

Mindhorn is inoffensively silly.

Why we're now laughing AT Ricky Gervais, not WITH him

The comic's new film's been panned and he's morphing into the narcissistic buffoon who made him famous.

Breaking The Bank review

Breaking The Bank is an amiably silly comedy set in the world of high finance.

Grimsby review

Sacha Baron Cohen's exceedingly silly, incorrigibly lewd, intermittently hilarious new film is being released in the US as The Brothers Grimsby.

Don't panic, it is funny... in parts

Nobody could ever make a better Captain Mainwaring than the late, great Arthur Lowe, but Toby Jones pulls off the pomposity, the middle-class chippiness and, above all, the comic timing, to something close to perfection.

Review: Kill Your Friends is vulgar

There are no taboos in Kill Your Friends. The script, adapted from his own satirical 2008 novel by John Niven, makes enthusiastic use of paedophilia, Aids, rape, incest and the Holocaust, among other subjects not known for their comedy value, in its relentless drive to shock.

Review: Witless film that can only be blamed on writer

At no stage did I believe for a second in these characters or their story, and since that can't be the fault of four such beloved actors, the culprit can only be the writer-director, Joel Hopkins.

If the 90 per cent empty auditorium in which I saw this film earlier this week is any guide, TV comic Harry Hill has not struck gold, but something much smellier, with his graduation to the big screen.

Maybe it's Marmite, for people either love or hate his brand of comedy. As with Marmite, if you don't have the taste for it, it's not easily acquired, and it won't be acquired here.

Like Russ Abbot and Freddie Starr, before him, Hill revels in the adjective 'madcap', and there is certainly a strong madcap element to this tale of the ever-genial Harry and his nan (an exceedingly game Julie Walters) taking their apparently terminally-ill hamster (in fact, a cuddly toy) to Blackpool.

On the way they run into Jim Broadbent, playing a three-armed female cleaner in a nuclear power station, and Sheridan Smith, who plays the princess in a nautical tribe of shell people. Meanwhile, they are pursued by two villains dispatched by Harry's evil identical twin Otto (Matt Lucas).

Hill has attracted some top-notch British talent. Whether they read the script first is open to question.

Otto is cross because he was given up for adoption to a group of Alsatians in Kettering, and from that you get a hint of the kind of humour that prevails.

It's surreal, for sure, but the kind of surrealism that makes you sink lower and lower in your seat, wondering whether to make a dash for the exit.

If you do sit it out, though, there's some enjoyment to be had in spotting the comedy references - to The Goodies, The Lavender Hill Mob, even Charlie Chaplin's City Lights.

But I'm afraid that serves mainly to remind us what good comedy is, and what this isn't.