This place exists to encourage denial and delusion: it parts wannabe novelists from their cash and provides a sense of purpose for desperately unhappy Beth Hardiment, excellently played by Tamsin Greig, who busies herself with cooking, fussing and not thinking about the state of her marriage. But most discomfited are the Hardiments, who preside over an excruciating 'writers' retreat'. The infusion of sexiness sends the locals all of a flutter, particularly celeb-fixated teen Jody, a scene-stealer of a turn from 17-year-old Jessica Barden. After rhinoplasty, she has reinvented herself in London as a glitzy columnist and now returns in babelicious triumph to the old stamping ground, where she employs her ex-boyfriend Andy (Luke Evans) to do up the family home for a quick sale, and begins an affair with eyeliner-wearing pop star Ben Sergeant, poutingly played by Dominic Cooper. Gemma Arterton plays Tamara, a posh girl from the catatonically sleepy village of Ewedown, whom locals remember as having a bit of a schnoz. If middle-classness could be crushed up and mainlined intravenously, these might well be the ingredients that would go into the mix: country pubs, writers' retreats, Buff Orpington hens, literary festivals, and a cameo from Radio 4's James Naughtie. I admit that Tamara Drewe does not have or aspire to the subtlety and elegance of Simmonds's original drawings, but it's a tremendously effective, forthright entertainment, and Frears and Buffini make their craftsmanship look easy, creating a soap-farce pastoral of Brit bourgeois out-of-towners. There is the taste of a McVitie's Boaster laced with mephedrone.

It's like a particularly salacious episode of The Archers, or a Midsomer Murders with the violence left to the end and left casually uninvestigated.

It's set in a world where people stick their noses into other people's business, or turn them up or otherwise get them put out of joint – and so, fittingly, a nose is here something to be surgically fixed or broken with a single, vicious punch. T he unpicturesque malice and boredom of the middle-class English countryside are cheerfully recounted in this broad Day-Glo comedy with brutal moments of violence Stephen Frears directs from a screenplay by Moira Buffini, based on the Posy Simmonds comic-book series.

Arterton tamara drewe