Freeview Film of the Day: My Best Friend's Wedding

My Best Friend's Wedding ★★★★
6.45-9.00pm Sony Movie Channel

A bright, subtle romantic comedy. You think you know exactly how it will end and yet maybe you don’t. Julia Roberts and Dermot Mulroney were best friends at college and vowed that if they were still single at 28 they would marry each other. Just before they reach that birthday he, now a sportswriter, calls her, now a food critic, to announce that he’s to marry beautiful, wealthy Cameron Diaz. Roberts, realising she has loved Mulroney all along, sets out to sabotage the wedding and win him for herself. Well, of course she’ll succeed, won’t she? She’s the lovely Julia Roberts, after all. But, hang on: gradually the sly tricks she pulls in an attempt to separate the loving couple make her less sympathetic than before. Ronald Bass’s screenplay provides an ending that you may well not have predicted, and the cast handles the comedy and the later, deeper stuff very well. Rupert Everett is the standout as Roberts’s gay editor and adviser.