Can unrelenting sultry weather really be blamed for a third-rate, Greek-tragedy-plot-derivative amongst a dysfunctional, Midwestern, American family?

Perhaps a good drenching in South Pembrokeshire rain, as experienced by some members of the audience en route to this Films4Tenby screening at the Fourcroft Hotel, would have quelled this movie family's overly contrived and profoundly depressing shenanigans.

Presided over by Meryl Streep as the widowed matriarch whose T.S.Eliot-quoting husband ('life is long') commits suicide close to the beginning, this film failed to impress me. In a movie that also pays homage to Elizabeth Taylor - the Streep character cites Taylor early on - in productions like Tenessee Williams's 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof' and the movie 'Who's Afraid of Virginina Woolf?' Streep's character isn't as compelling as Taylor's, though some audience members praised Streep's strong acting and the performance of other cast members.

Occasionally the camera pans to scorched plains with an endless highway snaking through this otherwise featureless landscape, and to a sky filled with migrating birds. By contrast, other cameras pick up the fine details of characters fanning themselves in the face of the merciless sun and Streep, whose character suffers from mouth cancer, complaining that she feels her mouth is on fire.

Rather than the illustrious progenitors of this movie quoted above, August:Osage County strikes me more as Catherine Cookson transported to the mid-west where damning familial revelations flow thick and fast one upon the other.

Maybe Tracy Letts's original stage play works better than her pretentious and unconvincing screen play. In the film, the tone of the dialogues is 99 per cent unmitigated bleakness (minus the mastery of an Ingmar Bergman): the only moment of humour in August: Osage County coming when Streep corrects her granddaughter: "It's cowboys and native Americans, not cowboys and Indians," having been corrected herself for displaying prejudice towards the native American carer - incidentally the only truly credible and likeable character in this movie.

At the end, I was glad to walk out into the torrential Tenby rain and enjoy the storm-bleary view of the harbour, the best thing on offer all evening apart from the Fourcroft's welcoming melon liqueur and whisky cocktail.

Next screenings: 'Her' - Monday, October 20; 'The Love Punch' - Monday, November 3.

Same time, same place.

Ruthie Alton