MAEVE Binchy might be forgiven for thinking that The Holiday is a remake of Tara Road that nobody bothered to tell her about. Nancy Meyers has lifted her idea of women from opposite sides of the Atlantic clicking on to the internet to exchange homes because they want to escape from unhappy relationships. Substitute Cameron Diaz for Andie McDowell and Kate Winslet for Olivia Williams and you might almost be watching the same movie. The settings have been switched, of course. Diaz, a successful director of Hollywood movie trailers, turns up in a limo at a picture-postcard Surrey cottage covered with Christmas snow rather than a terraced house in Georgian Dublin.

Winslet, who writes obits for the Daily Telegraph, flees not to New England but to LA when she learns that the paper's star writer (Rufus Sewell, yet again cast as a cad), with whom she is hopelessly in love, is getting married to someone else.

Both, to no one's surprise but their own, find new lovers through a series of comic cultural misunderstandings, Diaz falling for Winslet's widowed brother Jude Law and Winslet for a film composer (Jack Black) who has just been jilted by his girlfriend.

Along the way a veteran screenwriter Eli Wallach becomes Winslet's mentor, encouraging her to find reassurance by watching old Hollywood screwball comedies.

Sadly Nancy Meyers . . . who showed such a deft hand with Something's Gotta Give . . . doesn't seem to have followed his advice.

The Holiday lacks the wit of Sturges or warmth of Capra. If it had been directed by a man it would be open to the accusation of patronising woman as silly little things in desperate need of a male to make sense of their lives. The device of Diaz continually seeing her experiences in trailer flashes does little to lighten the 136-minute running time.

Special (Hal Haverman/Jeremy Passmore): Michael Rappaport.Running time: 90 mins ***

A woman who catches Michael Rappaport putting a parking ticket on her car becomes so distressed that he's shamed into tearing up her ticket.

Immediately her tears disappear.

She puts her mobile back to her ear saying, "Sorry, some asshole was trying to ticket me." Hoping to boost his confidence, Rappaport volunteers for a clinical trial of a new drug to suppress self-doubt. It's so effective he succumbs to a delusion that he has acquired superhuman powers of a hero from one of the comics he's addicted to and begins acting accordingly, imagining he can jump off roofs and walk through walls. The physical battering that ensues is endured with a deadpan stoicism that is oddly endearing, to the point that you almost wish what he thinks is happening really was. An allnight supermarket checkout girl with a chronic stutter tries to help him . . . when she manages to utter a complete word he tells her she has "a lovely voice" . . . and he even achieves a bloodied vindication of sorts. A modest movie but oddly watchable.