Grade: B+

Verdict: Like a chummy, drizzly afternoon in the pub with some of Britain's best actors.

Details: Starring Michael Caine, Bob Hoskins, Helen Mirren and Tom Courtenay. Directed by Fred Schepisi. 1 hour, 49 minutes. Rated R for language and sex.

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Review: The pub culture of Britain knows a boozy, melancholy, humor-streaked camaraderie the rest of us don't. However, "Last Orders" — Brit-speak for last call — gives us a pungent taste of it.

"Last Orders" also could refer to a last request. In this case, it's the dying wish of Jack (Michael Caine), an East London butcher who's asked his mates to scatter his ashes at Margate, a coastal dot of a town on the English Channel.

So, after one last round at the Coach and Horses, with Jack's urn on the bar beside them, the guys set off on their wobbly memory- and pint-spiked journey. They are Ray (Bob Hoskins), sturdy and stocky and with a weakness for the horses; Vic (Tom Courtenay), wryly gentle neighborhood undertaker who, of all of them perhaps, best understands death and remembrance; Lenny (David Hemmings), failed boxer long settled into beery belligerence; and Vince (Ray Winstone), Jack's troubled son, whose conflicted feelings about his dad are subtly revealed, as are the reasons for them.

Opting out of this mission is Jack's widow, Amy (Helen Mirren, perfectly capturing the glazed, for-appearances look of the newly widowed). Instead, she does what she's been doing nearly every week for 50 years: visiting their daughter, who's been institutionalized almost since birth and whose very existence drove a wedge between Amy and Jack.

As the men drive through the drizzly countryside, dropping in on a pub here, a cathedral there, a pub again, they make another kind of journey — into the past, where, in flashbacks, we see how lifelong friendships and relationships were forged. We skip from barely six weeks ago — the last time Jack was at the Coach and Horses — to moments in the '50s and '60s, then as far back as the '40s, where a raft of fine young actors makes impeccable stand-ins for elders. (Especially good is JJ Feild, who plays young Jack.)

Director Fred Schepisi is one of those gifted filmmakers who occasionally bob onto the surface of our cinema consciousness. Say "Roxanne" or "Six Degrees of Separation" and everyone goes, oh yes. Say "Fierce Creatures" or "Mr. Baseball" and everyone goes, huh?

Schepisi does an expert and respectful job of adapting Graham Swift's Booker Prize-winning novel. of the same name.His film is dusted with grace, tenderness and a rueful, slightly buzzed hilarity.

The back-and-forth structure can work against the movie's momentum. Much of the first third is so recessive and roundabout we wonder where it's all going. Yet the characters grab hold of us as we learn about their good times and disappointments, their secrets and lies.

The movie's plot honors the so-called Greatest Generation, whose lives stretch from World War II to the end of a millennium. The movie itself, however, honors another — the greatest generation of British actors ever to make their living primarily on film. There's Caine, "Alfie" rogue, now an aging charmer whose life has been tinged with discontent. Hemmings, the beautiful boy of "Blowup," now a barrel-chested boyo with flying-buttress eyebrows. Courtenay, eerily barely aged since glory days in "Billy Liar" and "Dr. Zhivago."

Hoskins, rock-solid as ever, holds up the side for the next generation. He trots out that gallant, sad-sack romanticism we saw years ago in "Mona Lisa." And Winstone, beefy, reluctant robber in "Sexy Beast," carries the torch for the generation thereafter. He captures duality in Ray;., with. choosing a Mercedes from his used car lot for the trip can be seen as either a tribute to his father or proving he did the right thing when he chose to sell cars rather than take over the family business.

"Last Orders" offers nostalgia laced with lyricism and regret. And it poses a haunting question: When does a memory become part of the past?

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution