Best in Show

That maestro of the Great American Mockumentary, Christopher Guest, has done it again. This is a little gem of a comedy, a film candidly and professionally structured around the business of getting real laughs with real gags. Using the genre’s now richly matured techniques – talking-head interviews interspersed with pseudo-vérité footage of the principals – director and co-writer Guest tells the story of the “Mayflower Kennel Club Dog Show”, following the fraught lives of the key competitors and their tremulous, talented pooches. They say the owner comes to look like his dog; this is a mockumentary which comes to resemble a sleek foxterrier, a nimble, agile little film: quick-witted, intelligent, responsive to the director's whistles and beckonings. Wherever the film’s collar is, it deserves to have a large rosette pinned on it. As in SPINAL TAP, director Christopher Guest demonstrates that in his own unshowy way, he is a very accomplished comic actor, never more so than in the heartbreakingly earnest way he jogs around the arena with his bloodhound Hubert. (Peter Bradshaw)

Supporting Film: QUEER PETS