What We Did on Our Holiday (Andy Hamilton & Guy Jenkin, 2014)

The Richard Curtis target demographic comedy-drama What We Did on Our Holiday features an array of familiar faces from British TV in a story of a couple in the process of divorce taking their kids to Scotland to celebrate his terminally ill father's probable last birthday. So far, so formula, but what saves the film is a script filled to the brim with sparklingly witty dialogue and pathos, and not least the kids, who manage to sidestep cloying cutesiness with utterly natural performances. The fact that Billy Connolly as the granddad, a sage and irreverent free spirit against the dying of the light, is basically just playing the popular perception of himself, works here to the film's advantage too. It's very funny in places and also imbued with genuine pathos, and so when it all inevitably gets a bit too feel-good by the end, it has earned just about enough of our indulgence to get away with it.

7/10