THE two British releases of the week are chalk and cheese. The Importance Of Being Earnest is the cheese, Once Upon A Time In the Midlands is the chalk, but it is wholly more palatable.

Feckless men are to be found in both works, indeed they inhabit all Shane Meadows' films, and this time in his third feature, the men are set for a Western-style face-off.

As the name suggests, Once Upon A Time In The Midlands nods in the direction of Sergio Leone's dusty confrontations, Meadows' Spaghetti Junction Western replacing horses with cars, and sand and tumbleweed with roads and estates. In Leone tradition, Brian Tufano films in 'Scope, the soundtrack whistles in the wind but the connection is merely cosmetic, an amusing undercurrent, because the Nottingham writer-director is back on familiar suburban, domestic ground.

For the first time, he brings a star cast with him, even Reeves and Mortimer for a clowning cameo and Vanessa Feltz for the opening scene, in which Rhys Ifans' gentle, car-loving tyre fitter Dek proposes to long-term girlfriend Shirley (Shirley Henderson) on national television, and is rejected in front of the jaw-dropping millions.

Watching in a Glasgow dump is her errant husband Jimmy (Robert Carlyle), who heads to Nottingham, cash in hand from his latest theft, to try to rekindle the past. He will have to handle their switched-on daughter Marlene (superb newcomer Finn Atkins); and the neighbours, Kathy Burke's sparky matriarch, and her husband (Ricky Tomlinson), banished for his obsession with country singing. And, of course, Dek for the showdown.

Burke and Tomlinson play to type, only broader; Carlyle fleshes out his psychopathic Scot with a more complex portrait and Ifans at last has the chance to do more than steal scenes in other people's movies.

Meadows still likes his japes, his bungling robbers, but he marries the pathos of Twentyfourseven with tenderness and honesty. Unlike Mike Leigh, he has affection for his characters and captures that dilemma of fractious families within tightly-knit communities. Erratic, uneven and hyperactive it may be, but this is home-made film-making with heart and soul.

Updated: 09:09 Friday, September 06, 2002