Peter O'Toole leaps off the screen (arthritic knees and all) as a septuagenarian rebel without a cause in this whimsical romantic comedy drama from Notting Hill director Roger Michell. O'Toole stars as Maurice Russell, an ageing actor who's reduced to playing corpses and coma patients on TV hospital dramas, and who spends his spare time hanging around with best friend and fellow veteran thespian Ian (an endearing Leslie Phillips). But when Maurice meets Ian's parochial but pretty young grandniece Jessie (the amusingly brash Jodie Whittaker), his heart begins to race and a complex relationship develops. While exploring similar themes to their 2003 film The Mother, Michell and writer Hanif Kureishi convey a tad more whimsy here. For Maurice, pursuing a young girl is about laughing in the face of death, though his recklessness and rapier wit start to grate on the nerves of Ian. Their early scenes are brilliantly funny, as the grumpy old men loaf in a coffee shop exchanging wonderfully pithy dialogue. Sadly, as the final curtain looms, the story bows to the conventions of melodrama, though that takes nothing away from yet another award-worthy performance from O'Toole.