While Lassie at least has a certain guileless naivety in its favour, The Family Stone is as calculating and contrived a film as I have seen in a long time. The Stone family, headed up by the kooky but straight-talking matriarch Diane Keaton, are celebrating Christmas together. The eldest son, Dermot Mulroney, brings his uptight girlfriend Meredith (Sarah Jessica Parker) to meet the family, and it doesn’t take long to figure out that Meredith is not Stone material. It’s not that the Stones are intolerant — the younger brother Thad is both deaf and gay, his boyfriend Patrick is African-American, which all smacks of shameless box-ticking tokenism on the part of the screenwriter. But the liberal, bohemian, tightly knit Stones are incapable of hiding their contempt for the self-obsessed, socially inept career woman Meredith.

What sinks this Christmas turkey from the outset is the fact that all the characters are such horrible, judgmental people that it’s difficult to have sympathy for anyone. The film plays the cancer card — and chucks in a couple of babies for good measure — and we still don’t give a fig for their festive angst. It’s a disingenuous piece of film-making, which, while it paints its characters as realistically flawed and complex people, cops out with a preposterously upbeat fantasy ending, with every loose end tied and every character neatly paired off. And this from a film that takes as its central premise the fact that all is not quite what it seems under the sparkly surface of the seemingly perfect family.

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