Michael Winterbottom’s freewheeling 2002 film about Tony Wilson, champion of post-punk bands, couldn’t have starred anyone but Steve Coogan

Michael Winterbottom’s intriguing, daring, freewheeling movie is being rereleased on its almost-quarter-century anniversary. It is about Manchester legend, Factory Records impresario, club owner and Granada TV journalist Tony Wilson, played by Steve Coogan, who was a driving entrepreneurial force behind the city’s music scene and guide to bands such as Joy Division, New Order and Happy Mondays.

Looking back to my original review I see that I was in some ways unconvinced, perhaps by the almost flippant, throwaway tone that is somehow evenly established from first to last, with Coogan’s Partridgean lead performance – very good though it undoubtedly is – delivering all the lines as if doing a wry piece to camera. He was arguably the only possible casting for a minor TV personality who was also a major player in the real world beyond the camera, a postmodern combination that Wilson, a sophisticated and intelligent man, himself surely savoured. Winterbottom’s A Cock and Bull Story, adapted from Laurence Sterne, is sometimes described as his postmodern work, although this film, with its fourth-wall breaking, real-world cameos and docu-realist sense of itself, is probably even more metatextual.

Succession is the question as Cox directs and stars as a distillery boss tempting estranged brother Cumming back into the Highland fold

For his directorial debut, Brian Cox is painting in pretty broad strokes and primary colours; Glenrothan is a sentimental comedy-drama from screenwriter David Ashton about the troubled reunion of two brothers in Scotland. It can be a bit soppy, sometimes resembling Sunday-night TV comfort food, but this big-hearted picture wins you over, and there are certainly some marvellous panoramic shots of the Highlands.

Cox himself plays Sandy, the glowering chief of a hugely profitable family-owned distillery which provides employment for the entire locality, and run by the fiercely competent Jess (Shirley Henderson). Sandy effectively inherited the job from his late father, a stern disciplinarian remembered in traumatised flashback scenes – for this role, Brian Cox has drolly cast his son Alan Cox.