It is said that Michael Caine decided to do the 1988 comedy Dirty Rotten Scoundrels after reading the script's first line: "EXT. SOUTH OF FRANCE. DAY". Perhaps Emma Thompson had a similar experience before accepting her role in this entirely ridiculous, cheerfully daft and very amiable midlife comedy in which she goes to the French Riviera to steal a super-valuable diamond. Thompson and Pierce Brosnan play Kate and Richard, a bickering divorced couple who face poverty in their retirement years because a sinister plutocrat has bought Richard's company and done a Robert Maxwell on the pension scheme on which these ex-spouses were relying. They are forced to team up to get revenge – and head off to Cannes, along with feisty neighbours Jerry (Timothy Spall) and Penelope (Celia Imrie), intent on pinching the tangerine-sized diamond that this corporate thief is reportedly planning to give his fiancee. It really is completely absurd, and yet writer-director Hopkins carries it along at a canter: his script borrows from the wish-fulfilment menopausal comedies of Nancy Meyers. The accomplished cast do their considerable best. Likable fun.