12A, 136mins

Nancy Meyers has been minting romantic comedies for the best part of 30 years. She is the Mills & Boon of Hollywood fiction, and her tales can hammer tears from a stone. Meyers’s ladies are modern, neurotic and on the wrong side of 30. Her studs are dashing mysteries or just plain cruel. Her lucrative trick is to make the humble viewer feel like God. She has learnt an awful lot from Jane Austen, and her latest confection, The Holiday , is like falling into a tub of warm syrup.

Kate Winslet is the Bridget Jones of an ailing, stuffy newspaper. She is wasting her precious time on the office cad, Rufus Sewell. She has hankered after this slippery Romeo for years, but her fears turn horribly real when her perfectly bald editor announces Sewell’s engagement to the busty new circulation man- ager at the office Christmas party. Winslet sobs her heart out, and we are invited to wrap a protective arm around her heaving shoulders.

This is the film at its manipulative worst. We feel older and wiser than Winslet’s lonely English rose. We’ve all yearned for the wrong pair of trousers. We gasp that such an abnormally attractive girl should be left in the lurch. Yet we earnestly believe that fate will provide.

This is how the most ridiculous coincidences are primed and sold in cinemas, and The Holiday is as conventionally barmy as they come.

The path to romantic fantasy is neatly provided by a stranger some 6,000 miles away. Cameron Diaz is a rich and terrifying owner of an LA advertising company whose perfect life is rudely interrupted when she discovers that her squeaky boyfriend has been sleeping with his secretary. She bumps into Winslet on the internet. The grieving women impulsively agree to swap homes for two weeks and, 24 hours later, they find themselves in chalk-and-cheese worlds.

Winslet is the easy winner. She bounces and squeals with delight at the luxury of Diaz’s septic mansion. Meanwhile, in snowy Surrey, Diaz wonders what possessed her to slum it in a dingly-dell cottage in the middle of nowhere until a tipsy Jude Law (playing Winslet’s brother) knocks on the door at 1am in search of a bunk, although a bonk suddenly doesn’t look out of the question.

Law is a silky and charming surprise in his first out-and-out romantic role. He is the only actor who doesn’t compete with the camera, and he coolly surfs some murderous lines. Jack Black’s slushy composer is a decidedly less appetising catch for Winslet. And Diaz is an irritating necessity. Unfortunately, her anal mania chimes all too sweetly with the slapstick clash of culture and manners. An infectious mistrust of happy endings is the predictable stumbling block. But I expect unfussy adolescents will not be deterred.

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