Brittany Runs a Marathon gives Bell a lot of smart comic business, but her character's humour is signalled from the first as a way of deflecting pain - and is often funny because it's so mistimed that the people around her don't get the joke.

It can't quite get itself tonally right...it didn't gel for me, but there are individual moments that are quite funny.

Bell is terrific in the title role and the film as a whole is a confident combination of the amiable and the uncompromising.

Brittany Runs a Marathon is the feel-good movie of this end-of-decade.