Video: Angela's Ashes

Herald rating: * *

Running time: 145 mins

Rental: Now

Review: Ewan McDonald

Mortal sin I know, but I just couldn't take Frank McCourt's autobiography seriously, probably because it came more than 30 years after Flann O'Brien took the Guinness out of Irish childhood stories of "suffering recollected in hilarity" in The Poor Mouth and The Hard Life. He even had the rain, the flooded house and Da not coming home.

Alan Parker's movie stars Emily Watson and Robert Carlyle as Frank's parents, and three actors playing Frank at various ages. Watson and Carlyle are fine but this lacks the practised black humour that was McCourt's most convincing trait.