Review: The Holiday

UK release date: 8th December

Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet headline this romantic comedy for the festive season. Watching it is like unwrapping an attractively packed gift only to discover it’s socks again.

Writer/director Nancy Meyers should have observed the advice of her previous film, Something’s Gotta Give, and let a few scenes go. She spends far too much time lingering on humdrum episodes such as Diaz and Winslet emailing each other to arrange a house swap for the holidays. They’re both fleeing the fallout of broken relationships, but inevitably hopping across the pond leads both of them to unexpected romance.

Diaz and Jude Law make a fairly engaging couple, although sadly the early stages of their relationship are clumsily knitted together, while Winslet and Jack Black remain an awkward pairing throughout. But the film’s funny moments are as thinly scattered as the English snow, which mysteriously keeps appearing and disappearing throughout the movie.

Radio Times rating:

**

UK cinema certificate 12A
Running time 135mins

Review by Stella Papamichael

News: Cameron Diaz

In news bound to disappoint red blooded males movie fans worldwide, this week’s The Holiday looks to be the last time we’ll see Cameron Diaz on screen for quite a while. Though she’ll still be voicing Princess Fiona in Shrek the Third, due in June 2007, she has recently announced that she’ll be taking a break from the movies – for how long remains unclear.

News: Kate Winslet

Due out on 3rd November, All the King’s Men star Kate Winslet’s performance in Little Children has been earning her fresh Oscar buzz – perhaps it will be fifth time lucky, after nominations for 1995’s Sense and Sensibility, 1997’s Titanic, 2002’s Iris and last year’s The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Playing a married mother who ends up exploring the highs and lows of infidelity, reports from the film festival circuit suggest this is one of her most powerful performances, even if the actress herself has since complained about the graphic nature of the sex scenes, telling reporters “I must remember not to do this ever again”.

She will later crop up doing voice work on the Aardman rat-based animation Flushed Away – out on 1st December – and the animated Shakespeare adaptation Gnomeo and Juliet (due 2008), as well as in the flesh alongside Jude Law, Cameron Diaz, Rufus Sewell and Jack Black in The Holiday, due on 8th December this year.

News: Jude Law

While not appearing in the gossip sections of the tabloids over the latest rumours about his relationship with rising starlet Sienna Miller, All the King’s Men’s Law has been a busy boy, having taken most of last year off. First up is The English Patient and The Talented Mr Ripley director Anthony Minghella’s Breaking and Entering where, alongside Juliet Binoche, Ray Winstone, Martin Freeman and his King’s Men co-star Sean Penn’s wife Robin Wright Penn, Law will play a landscape architect to starts to reassess his life after a run-in with a young burglar.

Next up will be The Holiday, where Law’s King’s Men co-star Kate Winslett plays an unluck-in-love woman who does a house-swap with an equally unfortunate woman, played by Cameron Diaz, in an attempt to turn her life around. Law plays one of the bits of male eye-candy, alongside Rufus Sewell and, somewhat implausibly, scruffy tubster Jack Black.

After a small role in cult Chinese director Wong Kar-Wai’s American road trip movie My Blueberry Nights, hopefully due out in the UK sometime late next year, Law’s most promising – and at the same time most worrying – upcoming project is Sleuth. Starring alongside Michael Caine – who seems to have forgiven Law for destroying his classic character Alfie in the abysmal 2004 remake – this is yet another remake of a British classic, the 1972 flick of the same name in which the younger Caine entered a battle of wits with Laurence Olivier over a marital infidelity. We can but hope that yet more cinematic memories aren’t soiled in the process…