A Cock and Bull Story

Winterbottom pulls off something of a coup with this almost-adaptation of ‘Tristram Shandy’. Rather than trying to shoehorn Sterne’s proto-post-modern novel into cinematic form, he presents an equally squirmy, self-reflexive account of a film crew’s attempt to do just that; like Shandy, ‘Cock and Bull’ spends its duration struggling to account for its own birth. Coogan plays himself playing Tristram, gamely mining his own tabloid reputation in the behind-the-scenes sequences – a conceit that makes the most of both Sterne’s and modern entertainment’s almost crippling self-awareness. As funny as it is clever, with the rivalry between Coogan and Brydon (‘Marion & Geoff’’) a particular delight.