And When Did You Last See Your Father? (15)

Daddy, we hardly knew how to talk to you before it was too late

And When Did You Last See Your Father? adapts Blake Morrison's best-selling memoir, a book which saw him musing on the love-hate relationship he had with his late father, and setting a trend for mild-mannered confessional literature in the process.

Blake (Colin Firth) is a successful, happily married writer, but he still hasn't had the approval he craves from his dad. When the aged Arthur Morrison (Jim Broadbent) is diagnosed with terminal cancer, Blake goes to stay at the family home in Yorkshire and thinks back to his childhood and adolescence in the 1950s and 1960s.

David Nicholls' sensitive script stays faithful to Morrison's book, which is to say that nothing much happens. The dramatic climax is the flooding of a tent on a camping trip. There is a skeleton or two rattling in the closet, but without any cathartic conflicts or resolutions, it's the sort of understated, discursive piece which might play better on television than in cinemas. Still, I ended up admiring its refusal to tidy the plot into a more conventional shape. One of the film's messages is that you don't always get the closure you're hoping for.

The casting is flawless, too. Broadbent is typically excellent as the quietly dying Arthur, as well as the domineering rascal that he was in his prime. Juliet Stevenson and Sarah Lancashire, among others, are just as affecting in the supporting roles. And while Firth usually seems too glum and repressed to play any character without the surname Darcy, his English reserve in this instance, as Blake struggles to say the things he's never got round to saying, is ideal.