The Holiday

"It desperately wants to be Love Actually. It is Toilet Actually." - Mark Kermode, BBC Radio 5live

Christmas-themed whiffle starring Jack Black (again), Cameron Diaz, Katie Winceyette and Jude Law.

Mark suggested that the absolutely ghastly nonsense was so bad - and so long - that a viewer's intestines would jump up and strangle their head in protest: "it should really have been 88 minutes tops, because then it would have just been vomit-inducingly ghastly. But as it is, it’s probably a threat to your bodily health."

It also gave Mark the chance to expound his theory that it isn't films like the 1980s video nasties that make people into bad, violent people. "No they don't. Movies like The Holiday turn people into bad, violent people, because they are so putrifyingly poor that you sit there feeling your life force ebbing away into the seat - and that's when evil thoughts of destruction start coming in."

Mark raised the possibility that the reason the movie is so terrible is that it is a pastiche, attempting to highlight and laugh at the winsome tropes of Christmas films everywhere.

It isn't.