A bickering middle-aged English couple return to Paris to celebrate their ill-fated 30th anniversary in this ruefully funny delight from director Roger Michell and screenwriter Hanif Kureishi (who previously collaborated on the Peter O’Toole vehicle “Venus’’).
Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan are superb as the couple, who use the occasion to drop bombs on each other. He’s a college professor in less-than-glamorous Birmingham who’s been forced to take early retirement because of a racially insensitive remark to a student. She’s planning to leave her penny-pinching husband, who wants their layabout son to move back in with them.
Things come to a head after a chance meeting with a self-absorbed American classmate of the husband’s from Cambridge (wittily played by Jeff Goldblum), now a famous novelist who’s left his wife for a younger woman and moved to the City of Lights.
“Le Week-End,’’ which plays like a smarter and older version of “After Midnight,’’ has Duncan considering spending the night with a younger charmer she meets at a party, while her husband learns a thing or two from Goldblum’s alienated son (Olly Alexander).