Miles, Giamati’s character, divorced two years ago and has failed to move on. Jack, played by Church, wants one last fling before he gets married. They were once college roommates, now in their late middle years, and together set off on what you immediately sense is an ill-fated bachelor’s week. Their friendship is at the end of its natural life, they have grown apart over the years and, you feel sure, they will not be seeing much of each other after the wedding. But they are on a mission to pretend themselves still young, still virile, and still best of buddies. Gradually the masks fall from their faces, and they reveal themselves for what they are – a failed writer and failed actor, respectively. Ominously, they visit the same area that Miles used frequently to holiday in with his ex-wife.

This is a film about getting old, about looking back on your life and realising how little you have achieved. Most of the reviews I’ve read have been written by men of a certain age, marvelling and lamenting at how accurately observed the lead roles are. Neither man has much to look back on with pride – instead of writing the Great American Novel, Miles has suffered a string of rejection letters and treads water teaching at the local high school. Jack once had a role in a daytime soap, and now gets by through doing voiceover work in adverts. Even his impending marriage – the one real success they have between them – is tempered by the fear he displays going into it. His fling with Stephanie, played by Sandra Oh, is a deliberate, if subconscious, attempt to sabotage that future and hold onto the illusion of youth. Those middle-aged newspaper columnists find themselves identifying with facets of the characters and regretting their already spent lives – this young reviewer finds himself terrified of what the future holds. Bitterness and rejection would seem to be my lot. But it’s not all bad. The sun and the wine, as I say, do much to mollify the regret (how much easier it must be to stomach failure in the Californian summer than the Edinburgh winter), and Miles finds hope in the form of Virginia Madsen’s Maya. In fact my only complaint about the film is that Maya is a little too perfect for Miles – if this is a story about the harsh realities of life, and the need to be realistic in your expectations and make the best of what you’ve got, then how can such a soulmate appear just at the moment of Miles’ despair? Surely in real life most people don’t manage to get their ideal partner, but instead work hard to love, or at least to make do with, the nearest thing they can find.

But this is a quibble, and certainly their relationship on screen is tender and beautiful to watch unfold. The film as a whole is an understated masterpiece – the nuances of human interactions are crisply captured, the pace is perfectly matched to the sleepy beauty of the area it is set in, the continuous jazz score lends an easy-going, whimsical tone, and the acting is absolutely without fault. ‘Sideways’ is more than deserving of all the praise it has received, not least its Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar, and is the most rewarding film I have seen since ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.’