Former Brookside "babe" Anna Friel's big-screen career hasn't exactly got Hollywood perched on the edge of its seat.

There was the engaging but slight Land Girls, the adequate but hardly-set-the-world-on-fire Rogue Trader and the less said about Mad Cows the better.

However, it's a pleasure to report Friel has finally found a vehicle for her particularly elfin talent in this endearing tale of best friends growing up.

One hot day in Seventies London Marina (Friel) and Holly (Michelle Williams) make a childhood pact to be friends forever.

For the troubled, unpredictable Marina, with her valium addicted single mum (Mrs Sting, Trudi Styler), Holly stays the only constant in a life of college, experimental drugs and casual sex.

Meanwhile, Holly buries herself in books and nurtures the needy Marina, never letting on that she has a passion for Marina's brother Nat (Oliver Milburn).

The one-sided relationship rolls on until the pair find themselves unknowingly being bedded by the same English lecturer, a splendidly seedy Kyle Mclachlan.

The shallow Marina tries to impress with her knowledge of Bergman - "the one about death in black and white" while Holly woos him with her literary leanings.

When the realisation comes it rents them apart and Holly realises her relationship with Marina has become a trap and the inseparable pair choose different paths. For a while.

Director Sandra Goldblacher, who also had a hand in the script, perfectly captures student life in the Eighties - half-rolled joints on the cover of The Human League's Dare, two-bar fires in freezing flats and, er, New Romantics.

Friel plays to her strengths as the sparky but emotionally disturbed Marina while Williams is superb as the studious but passionate Holly.

After a year of appalling teen rites of passage dramas this comes as a welcome, well acted slice of life.

Tim Evans