Dick and Mandy (Philip Davis and Lesley Manville) are young marrieds settling into their first row-house while their neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Butcher, are old hands at the marriage game. Dick and Mandy want a baby but instead get Mandy's ubiquitous older sister Gloria, whose normality has reached critical mass and who is now looking for a safe place to explode into babbling idiocy. Grown-Ups is a surprisingly funny film of postures, squints and tics which builds to a ravaging climax in the upstairs hallway, just outside the loo. It has the look of nausea-no one fails to notice that Dick and Mandy's house "could use a clean"-but it is a kind film, a loving film, in only the way that Mike Leigh can be: without patronizing, he anguishes with his creations; while he allows us to laugh at them, he's somehow on their side. A scene in which Dick, Mandy and Gloria, now that they are "grown up," recall their dismal years in high school is a classic of comi-tragedy. "The general tendency in my films is to say, by implication, that life could be better," Leigh understated recently in our interview. Grown-Ups is about finding that out. One of his best films, not to be missed.