Review: The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Spry sequel to the cross-cultural smash featuring Judi Dench and Maggie Smith.

The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel: rewarding

Maggie Smith and Celia Imrie shine in a surprisingly moving sequel to the 2012 word of mouth comedy hit, says Robbie Collin.

Watch Dame Judi Dench's wise words fall on deaf ears

World exclusive clip shows Maggie Smith's Muriel Donnelly just doesn't want to listen.

The biggest TV stand-up of the 1970s gets a proper appraisal in this very well put together documentary. His laconic, no-frills style is revisited and analysed but the meat of the programme is in telling the story of his life and the little stories behind his instantly recognisable, enormously popular performance tics. Great clips, many of them rarely seen, are bolstered by contributors from Allen's family and celebrities including Stephen Frears, Maggie Smith and Steven Berkoff.

"Here lies Dave Allen, a comedy fool/Who drank and told gags as he sat on his stool ..." Allen's own epitaph for himself neatly encapsulates his received image as one of the great bar-room raconteurs, but the Vatican-baiting humorist (who received death threats from the IRA) also pushed more boundaries in his time than the so-called alternative comics who followed. Admirers and friends such as Mark Thomas and Dame Maggie Smith bear witness to his peculiar genius in this fond and very personal tribute.

A naïve vicar (Rowan Atkinson) is blissfully unaware that his wife (Kristin Scott Thomas) is falling for her golf instructor (Patrick Swayze) and that his children are up to no good. Fortunately a housekeeper (Maggie Smith) arrives to spring-clean the family in her own special way. Fun British comedy.

The ghost of Joe Orton looms large over this spirited black comedy from White Noise scriptwriter Niall Johnson. A dark British farce, it boasts a delicious performance by ]Maggie Smith as an elderly housekeeper with a deadly way of resolving domestic unrest. Hired to look after the family of Rowan Atkinson's nerdy country vicar, she quietly sets about tackling their individual problems - from his son being bullied at school to his teen daughter's nymphomania.

While her resulting Serial Mom-style solutions are often predictable, they're no less entertaining, benefiting from some neat gallows humour and an edgy sense of fun. In fact, Smith outshines all the cast with her immaculate comic timing, despite strong competition from Patrick Swayze as a sleazy US golf instructor who's romancing Atkinson's wife, Kristin Scott Thomas.

Surprisingly, the only real downside is Atkinson, whose customary bumbling schtick feels forced and twee in an otherwise boisterous affair.

A would-be black comedy in a rural British setting, this sees vicar Walter Goodfellow (Rowan Atkinson, of course) employing a housekeeper, Grace (Maggie Smith), who just happens to be a released murderer. Equally unimaginative casting comes in the form of Kristin Scott Thomas as a foul-mouthed, frustrated wife and Patrick Swayze as a pervy American golf pro who gets the village ladies in a spin.

Grace sets about solving the Rev Goodfellow's family problems in her own unique style while the family engage in farcical sitcom banter (sometimes funny, sometimes not). It's like dumping a serial killer into a very, very long episode of The Vicar of Dibley and expecting it to work: there's no artful black comedy here, just an uncomfortable clash between broad provincial humour and a murder plotline.

The central cast are up to the job: Smith deadpans delightfully when she can, and Atkinson upgrades his bumbling Four Weddings and a Funeral performance to mildly amusing effect. But despite its genial characters, Keeping Mum is an undisciplined, ultimately unsuccessful experiment in British black comedy.