Prairie Home Companion is the late Robert Altman's last ever film, it being in the can just before he died. Inevitably, one watches this mild, but touching comedy with a hint of sadness but also a sense of joy at seeing the final evidence of such a superlative director.

On hand is a great cast: the likes of Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, party girl Lindsay Lohan, Tommy Lee Jones, Kevin Kline, Virginia Madsen, John C Reilly, Woody Harrelson and the man with the smoothest voice of all, Garrison Keillor. It's impressive just for who's in it.

They all play stars of an evening radio show called 'The Prairie Home Companion' (the background being that Garrison Keillor has a radio show of the same name which has been going in Minniesota for decades). It's almost with a hint of Altmanesque inevitability that the performers here discover backstage that this show is about to be their last, because a hard-nosed businessman (Tommy Lee Jones) is about to pull the plug. That is unless a mysterious blonde (Virginia Madsen) can persuade him to do otherwise.

Naturally it's therefore tinged with sadness and nostalgia as the performers go out one last time. Kevin Kline plays a suspicious backstage security manager Guy Noir who sends out singing cowboys Dusty (Harrelson) and Lefty (Reilly) to join the likes of Yolanda (Streep) and Rhonda (Tomlin), and Yolanda's singing daughter Lola (Lohan) and Garrison Keillor (playing himself) to perform, Keillor adding voiceover adverts which in their inane phrasing are very amusing.

PHC is a throwback to a nicer, kinder era, and will be appreciated and enjoyed by older audiences as well as by fans of Altman. It's a great send-off and acted out by a cast known to all. Directed by Altman and scripted by Keillor, one hopes this film finds the audience it deserves. It's a greatly enjoyable film to watch merely because you feel you're among performers with no airs and graces and you feel you're enjoying a 'live' performance from an audience seat as well as catching the backstage asides in the dialogue which were always typical of any Altman film. The musical numbers seems to fit in effortlessly with the dialogue giving PHC a fitting sense of magic, given this was Robert Altman's swansong as a director.