In many ways Bruce Robinson's Withnail and I is what the great and good British film industry is all about. It is an eccentric, intimate and well-written independent production that would never have seen the light of day in Hollywood.

There is a certain kind of movie that gets praised not so much because of its virtues as because, in some strange way, we suspect that no one would ever dare make its like again. Withnail and I is one of those enterprises.

If the film belongs to anyone, it is Richard E. Grant, who takes the dissolute and mannered character of Withnail and creates a Wildean creature of tragi-comic proportions, the like of which has not been seen in a British film for some time.

For that matter, with its one-has-to-laugh feeling of being basically doomed, too distracted, and forever unable to slow down, it’s also unnervingly, perhaps perpetually current.