REVIEWED - CHRISTMAS WITH THE KRANKS: Somebody at Sony Pictures has checked their list once, then checked it twice and decided that we have been naughty, not nice. But what could we have possibly done to deserve this? The yuletide film reviewed elsewhere on these pages seems like a masterpiece by comparison, and it stars Ben Affleck, for Pete's sake, Donald Clarke.

Christmas with the Kranks, which comes from a novel by John Grisham, stars a charmless, impassive Tim Allen and an apparently deranged Jamie Lee Curtis as a suburban couple facing up to their first Christmas without their daughter about the place. She's not dead, you understand - though, considering the entirely inappropriate subplot concerning terminal illness that appears elsewhere, I wouldn't have put it past the idiot writers - but has gone to Peru with the Peace Corps. So Jamie and Tim decide to cancel Christmas and go on a cruise. Good for them. This sounds like our kind of film.

What follows would, if it were intended satirically, be a brilliantly savage indictment of that class of suburban conformity which, though defined by its adherents as community spirit, is really closer to a class of Bake Sale fascism. Everyone on the street turns positively savage when the Allen-Curtises refuse to put up their snowman and deck their halls. Little kids taunt them. Anonymous phone calls wake them. Unkind stories are fed to the local press.

All this would be fine if the townsfolk came to understand the error of their ways. But, even before we get to the seemingly endless party scene at the film's close, it becomes clear that the film-makers believe the Advent Taliban to be in the right.

Rarely has so slight and insignificant a film left quite such a vile aftertaste.