The Adventures of Greyfriars Bobby (PG) <!-- none onestar twostar threestar fourstar fivestar -->

"You want a friend, get a dog," snarled Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, and no man in history seems to have had a more loyal canine companion than John Gray, a police constable in 1850s Edinburgh. His terrier, Bobby, was so devoted that, when Gray died in 1858, the dog would visit his master's grave for the next 14 years.

This true story has been burnished and sentimentalised into a Scottish folk story by director John Henderson, the most impressive aspect of which is the location work in Edinburgh; its cobbled streets and gaunt tenements have never looked more forbidding. The subsidiary theme of social injustice is less convincingly handled - the courtroom finale is very lame - but the cast (led by James Cosmo and the eponymous mutt) put on a serviceable show.