Toast

By turns sweet and tart, airy and rich and, above all, a thoroughly irresistible confection.

Ms. Bonham Carter's hearty performance makes Mrs. Potter almost lovable. You may laugh at her garishness, but you applaud her pluck and stamina.

Like the lemon meringue pies and shrimp cocktails it features throughout, Brit comedy-drama Toast is tasty, hearty and rather conventional.

Based on a memoir by Nigel Slater, a British celebrity chef who makes a cameo appearance, Toast also charts the budding chef's growing interest in hunky, scantily clad guys. Be warned: Some of the regional British accents would benefit from subtitles.

Slater's book was evidently an ax-grinder, and the resulting film, directed with tone-deaf comic rhythm by S.J. Clarkson, shows pity and bemusement for the people raising Nigel but rarely human interest in them. More damning still, even the food looks ugly.

The first-person source material might explain the one-sided account of the struggle, but the film is crippled by its underhanded treatment of Bonham Carter's character, including a healthy dose of unmitigated middle-class snobbery.

I could pile on the cooking metaphors until you cried "uncle," but the fact remains that there's a very good movie in here that its makers have failed to bring off.

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Here is how I imagine this hypothetical sequence of events. Screenwriter Lee Hall, best known for the Billy Elliot script, sat down and read Nigel Slaterâ

Wow. How could anyone give this a good review? Gary Goldstein, etc. should get their heads checked. The relationships between the characters are completely underdeveloped and contradictory, I had no empathy for anyone in the movie. How could characters based on real people be so one-dimensional and phony? Nigel is an unlikable brat, the father is a complete cartoon character, and the mother is an unloving zombie. My wife cries for almost every movie, but not for this supposed "tear jerker".