In his last movie, Like Crazy, the American independent director Drake Doremus drew on personal experience to tell the lightweight, bittersweet tale of a young American student of furniture design whose affair with a somewhat kooky British would-be writer (Felicity Jones) foundered terminally when she overstayed her student visa and was excluded from re-entering the US. The charming Miss Jones plays another British visitor in Breathe In, in this case Sophie, an exchange music student from Berkshire spending a term at a high school in exclusive exurban Westchester, New York.

Her hosts – the preening cellist and music teacher Keith Reynolds (Guy Pearce), his devoted wife (Amy Ryan) and pretty daughter (Mackenzie Davis) – are first seen sending out round robin letters to their friends, thus announcing themselves as tiresome, complacent and riding for a fall.

Predictably, Sophie makes Keith aware of his age and the critical stage his career is in, and he falls for her. Meanwhile she flirts with the daughter's high-school swain and makes a provocative trip to New York with him. This is the kind of movie conceived as a tasteful attraction for people who consider themselves superior to the similar but vulgar Richard Dreyfuss vehicle Mr Holland's Opus. Give me Mr Holland any day.