Grace Hawkins (Maggie Smith) is the new housekeeper for the Goodfellow family. She is really there, in the tradition of Mary Poppins and Nanny McPhee, to help this unhappy family relate to one another again.

But unlike the other movie supernannies, Grace does not have magical powers. Instead, she has to get rid of the obstacles to the Goodfellows' happiness the old-fashioned way. With a skillet, a flat-iron, a meat cleaver and a pair of bolt cutters (the perfect tool for cutting brake lines).

The Goodfellows are happy. Grace moves on. Then the county engineers decide that the parish pond needs to be drained...

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This is an amusing, but dark, British comedy in the tradition of films like Kind Hearts and Coronets.

Rowin Atkinson plays Vicar Walter Goodfellow,and is befuddled and as his wife Gloria (played by Kristin Scott Thomas) says "half a day behind everyone else." This is a standard character for him, and he does it so well.

Maggie Smith is deliciously enjoyable playing Grace as the love-child of Mary Poppins and Norman Bates. When confronted with the idea that you can't kill people just because you don't approve of them, she replies, "That's what my doctors used to say. It's the only point we could never agree on."

The film was released in 2005, but just started appearing in Blockbusters lately.

Whoops! that should be Rowan Atkinson.