Happy New Year, Colin Burstead

The curious thing about this, from a young and supposedly edgy director, is how conventional it is - exactly the sort of thing that would be shown as a Christmas Play For Today 30-40 years ago, and has been done much better in films like The Family Stone. The characters' actions are often implausible, many of the characters themselves are superfluous (or there only to widen the demographic net) and, although if you persevere to the end it's not entirely negative, it is certainly drab and depressing. A lot of the dialogue sounds improv and, as another reviewer says, they seem to have thought that if they got a decent cast together and workshopped it something good would just magically emerge.

And what bloody awful musical taste the family has! We had to keep turning the volume down during the 'disco' scenes. I didn't mind the actual soundtrack music, though, and there are no 'Irish jigs' - it sounds more like the Elizabethan Session or something similar.