With or Without You

This humdrum drama about a thirty-something couple trying to have a baby lacks the ambition and intensity that Winterbottom usually brings to his work. There's something perverse about hiring a cinematographer with the visual flair of Delhomme and then making him shoot the film as if it's a small scale TV drama. Eccleston is Vince, the dour, suspicious husband, an ex-RUC man now working for his father-in-law. Kirwan is his wife, Rosie. They're trying to have a baby, but Rosie can't conceive and Vince grows increasingly jealous of her friendship with her French pen pal (Attal), who - again true to national stereotype - is as sleek, witty and romantic as her husband is boorish. Winterbottom's one real achievement is to make a movie set in Belfast in which, for once, the Troubles don't intrude.