Coming Up Roses

In a small Welsh town stands the Rex, an old dog of a cinema showing black-and-white horror pics to an audience of empty seats. Inevitably, the cinema is closed, and the manager Eli, projectionist Trevor, and ice-cream lady Mona are thrown onto the slag-heap of unemployment (this, by the way, is the time of the miners' strike). When Trev's ex-wife needs £700, he borrows the ailing Eli's funeral money, and he and his new love Mona are then faced with the problems of how to pay it back and save the cinema and their jobs. Updating The Smallest Show on Earth, this is the second-ever Welsh language movie released in the UK (the first being Boy Soldier). Subtitled in English, it's a chuckling good comedy with an edge. 'Take the cinema away from us and what other means of escape is there?' pleads old Eli; none from the grim realities of Thatcher's Britain.