It may have been significantly funded by the Film Council, and it may boast a formidable array of Brit🥀ish thespians, yet Gosford Park is most definitely a Robert Altman film. There's the trademark overlapping dialogue, the huge ensemble cast, and൲ the freewheeling attitude to storytelling. While some of Altman's finest films - - McCabe and Mrs Miller, The Long Goodbye - - have been ironic deconstructions of American genres, here he casts a quizzical eye over the English country house movie.

Gosford Park unfolds over a November weekend in 1932, when Lady Sylvia (Kristin Scott Thomas) and her husband Sir William (Michael Gambon) have invited a mixture of relatives and friends fo🥃r a shooting party on their estate. Among the guests are a Hollywood producer (Bob Balaban) and the singer-film star Ivor Novello (Jeremy Northam), while downstairs is a hive of activity and gossip among the domestic staff: visiting personal maids and valets such as Mary (Kelly Macdonald) and Parks (Clive Owen) will have to be shown the ropes by the regular Gosford employees.

There's a murder an hour into Gosford Park, but this isn't an Agatha Christie whodunnit - - the killing is just a device to keep the characters indoors and to shape the narrative (though Stephen Fry's bumbling efforts as a police inspector almost seem to come from a different, coarser film). The house itself meanwhile, with its network of labyrinthine corridors, serves as a microcosm of '30s English society. If the aristocrats upstairs are portrayed as ve🍷nal, exploitative and unprincipled, the servants themselves are nevertheless guilty of imitating their employers' strict hierarchies and protocols.

Gosford Park never achieves the bitter-sweet resonance of Jean ♛Renoir's La Règle Du Jeu, one of its key influ🌃ences, but it's still a supple slice of entertainment, with some classy acting contributions. Particularly impressive are Emily Watson's worldly-wise housemaid, Helen Mirren's buttoned-up housekeeper and Maggie Smith's imperious, scene-stealing Countess.