Gosford Park Details

At his prime, during the 1970s, maverick director Robert Altman would take an established genre and turn it on its head — the war movie with MASH), the western with McCabe and Mrs Miller, the private-eye thriller with The Long Goodbye. With Gosford Park he was back and firing on all cylinders, imposing the same trick on the English country-house murder mystery. A huge cast of mostly British thespians — including Richard E Grant, Emily Watson, Kelly MacDonald and Clive Owen — fleshes out the part whodunnit, part Upstairs, Downstairs satire, while Altman assuredly presents the 1930s-set drama from the servants' perspective. The opening of the piece — when the guests and their maids and valets arrive at Gosford Park — is as good as anything Altman's done in 30 years: multilayered and impeccably choreographed. Meanwhile, the dramatic pace is maintained thanks to some sparkling dialogue — the acidic, Oscar-winning script is by Monarch of the Glen actor Julian Fellowes — and fine performances. It has all the makings of a classic, but then Stephen Fry's bumbling detective arrives and a surfeit of irony defuses the exquisitely constructed mood.

Witty, acute, splendidly acted dissection of a way of life at the point of its disintegration; it captures not only the antagonism between the working- and upper-classes, but also their complicity in the continuation of a decadent social system.