From writer/director Sara Sugarman (Mad Cows) comes this uncategorizable confection that heaps on sweet and dark in equal measure. When we first meet widowed baker Jack Pugh (Jonathan Pryce), he’s wearing a Pavarotti mask and singing along with Puccini as he drives his bread truck through lush green hills that might be Tuscany but are in fact Wales. A charismatic crooner, ladies’ man, and pillar of the community, he treats his clumsy, slouching daughter Annie Mary (the ubiquitous Rachel Griffiths) as if she were a lump of dough. Then he has a stroke: the music stops (yet Pryce still commands the screen with his semi-paralyzed facial expressions) and the tables turn. We learn Annie Mary was once a gifted singer but gave up a scholarship to tend her sick mother; she’s been her father’s drudge ever since.

Jack’s embittered helplessness galvanizes Annie Mary to get away from him and on with her life. The sentimental subplot involves a local fundraising effort to send her bedridden best friend to Disneyland; Annie Mary coaches a pop group to win a talent contest in Cardiff, and hilarity (reminiscent of The Full Monty and Muriel’s Wedding) ensues. Thick Welsh accents and a melodramatic quirkiness that sometimes seems a bit forced are the only flaws in this stunningly acted, often darkly subversive (abuse of the disabled, for example) story, a worthy addition to the burgeoning bumper crop of Celtic cinema.