Finding Your Feet

When her marriage of 35 years collapses, a snobbish upper-crust wife (Imelda Staunton) moves in with her aging-hippie, semi-estranged older sister (Celia Imrie). She gets a bracing dose of how the other half lives, eventually climbing down off her high horse and joining the sister’s elderly dance class, where she takes a shine to a houseboat-dwelling handyman (Timothy Spall). Writers Meg Leonard and Nick Moorcroft and director Richard Loncraine whip up the kind of middlebrow, middle-class feel-nice comedy that has been a stock-in-trade of British movies since the coming of sound, as comfy and enjoyable as it is formulaic. A last-act plot turn is straight out of the Dictionary of Tearjerker Clichés (look under “C”), but by that time we’re enjoying these people’s company so much that we don’t really mind.