“FINDING Your Feet” leaves few, if any, boxes unticked as director Richard Loncraine turns loose a principal cast drawn from the upper stratum of Britain’s performing arts talent on a screenplay covering just about every emotion in the panoply of human feelings.

The story revolves around a pair of geriatric sisters and draws in an equally well-matured supporting population in a working-class area of London. Seen it before? Not like the way Meg Leonard and Nick Moorcroft tell it.

Sandra (Imelda Staunton) arrives unannounced, bag and baggage, at her older sister Bif’s (Celia Imrie) council flat. The pair hasn’t seen each other for quite some time. Why now? Sandra has just learned that her tennis-loving husband in a more affluent suburb has been playing away with her best chum. Sandra seems to expect that the world owes her a living, drinks too much and morosely lies about the place contributing nothing.

Unmarried Bif is a fun girl who sees life as what she makes of it, not a great housekeeper because she’s often out and about doing cultural and social good things including an older folks’ dance group that has a major function in the film’s progress. She’s buddies with Charlie (Timothy Spall) who lives alone on a canal boat moored alongside one that’s home to widower Ted (David Hayman).

This quartet of top English actors plays characters providing the backbone for a story that generates delighted laughter for its witty dialogue and hilarious situations before morphing into grief at several levels whenever it bumps into another of ageing’s vicissitudes. The package works wonderfully well. Life goes on. The sisters interact credibly, reminding us that there’s more to movies than youngsters obsessed with appearances. And when it comes time to roll the closing credits, the film delivers a wonderfully-unresolved, feel-good moment.

At all cinemas