Small Apartments (Jonas Åkerlund, 2012)

Great British TV comedians have not, on the whole, had a happy history of trying their luck on the big screen, and sadly Small Apartments is no exception, though it does prove that Matt Lucas is actually capable of acting as well as doing silly voices, so he's really not to blame. He plays Franklin Franklin, a blobby loser given to playing an Alpine horn in his dingy little Californian flat, with an assortment of oddballs for neighbours and a pantomime villain landlord who he ends up killing inadvertently, leading to scrapes thickly ladled with gallows humour as he attempts to cover up the crime. The tone swings uncertainly from absurdism and gross-out comedy to pathos, and there is the vexatious overall air of a belief in the notion that if you stick enough weirdness in, profound meaning about life's rich tapestry will be generated, which is a cloying hallmark of much of American independent cinema and fiction. Thank God, then, for Lucas, who may yet have a film career on this evidence, successfully bridging the gap between his Little Britain monstrosities and a real dramatic persona.

4/10