Warm, wise and witty, The Barbarian Invasions is a beautiful film. A sequel to writer-director Denys Arcand's barbed relationships comedy The Decline Of The American Empire, it finds its frank and funny French-Canadian friends 15 years older, reunited at the bedside of the terminally ill Remy (Rémy Girard). His estranged son (Stéphane Rousseau) is also on hand - a city broker who finds it hard to forgive his philandering father. This sounds serious but it's never sombre, with chuckles to match tears, jokes jostling with acidic observations on mankind's "history of horrors".

You don't need to have seen the original to appreciate the deftly created, charismatic characters, or the depth of feeling they share - which is as universal as the themes of sex, ageing, family and faith also explored here.

More expansive than the first film - which was set in a country retreat where Remy revelled in his infidelities and was eventually exposed to his wife (Dorothée Berryman) - Barbarians is nonetheless unafraid to simply watch people interact, with little visual flash.

"A POIGNANT, POWERFUL PICTURE"

Touching on terrorism, the North American genocide (200,000 "indians" by Remy's reckoning), and state care ("I voted for Medicare, I'll accept the consequences"), it's like engaging in an exceptionally good conversation.

The performances are terrific throughout, especially from Girard, and Marie-Josée Croze, as the world-weary junkie daughter of an old mistress, who supplies him with pain-relieving heroin and finds his lust for life inspires her to get clean.

It's a little broad in its depiction of corrupt trade union workers whose palms must be greased to keep the hospital running smoothly, and some may find the intellectualising hectoring.

But Barbarians is about people as much as ideas, its message apparently being that friendship outlasts any "ism". A poignant, powerful picture, laced with love and laughter.

In French with English subtitles.