Keeping Mum benefits from strong casting. [Maggie Smith], of course, would keep our attention just reading the yellow pages. [Kristin Scott Thomas] is less of a natural at comedy (her breakout role was in The English Patient, though she's also appeared in Gosford Park, Mission Impossible, etc.); mind you, she is cast as a vicar's wife. Playing the vicar, [Rowan Atkinson] (of the pop-eyes and worried little mouth) is spot-on. As the horny golf pro, [Patrick Swayze] lets out all the stops; he's a Yank, after all. Unfortunately, neither Lance and [Gloria] nor Gloria and [Walter Goodfellow] have the least spark of chemistry.

Then we watch a pool of blood oozing from a trunk in the train's baggage car and realize that actually we're in territory pioneered back in the late '40s and early '50s by Ealing Studios, producers of such black comedy masterpieces as Kind Hearts and Coronets and The Ladykillers.

Motion pictures