And the award for festive romcom trying to be like Love Actually goes to...

Your Christmas Or Mine?

Cert: 12, 1hr 35mins

Available on Amazon Prime

★★★★★

Violent Night

Cert: 15, 1hr 52mins ★★★★★

White Noise

Cert: 15, 2hrs 16mins

Available on Netflix from Dec 30

★★★★★

The Infernal Machine

Cert: 15, 1hr 51mins

★★★★★

Sometimes, and particularly at this emotionally charged time of year, what we crave is the comforting and familiar. And that’s exactly what Your Christmas Or Mine? gives us. This is the festive romcom that sets out to be the new Richard Curtis. It doesn’t really come close but will still pass 90 minutes cheesily – sorry, I mean cheerily – enough when you sit down to watch it on Amazon Prime.

Yes, it’s bog-standard British Christmas romcom time, as cheery carol singers, twinkling fairy lights and the imminent threat of snow greet our loved-up young couple, James (Asa Butterfield) and Hayley (newcomer Cora Kirk), as they arrive at London’s Marylebone station on December 23.

He’s tall, nicely spoken and heading home to Gloucestershire. She’s pretty, has a Northern twang and is off to see family in Macclesfield.

They’d much rather be spending Christmas together, of course – so much so that no sooner are they settled on their respective trains that they each rush to get on the other’s. And somehow, by romcom magic, they miss each other in the middle.

So now down-to-earth Hayley is heading off to James’s stately pile, while rather posh James is about to walk into an episode of The Royle Family in Cheshire. And then it snows, they each get stuck and, of course, there are important lessons to be learned.

It’s all a bit creaky, and the fact that James and Hayley spend so much screen time apart means we’re never quite convinced that love really must bring them together. But Alex Jennings and Harriet Walter do a top-class job of being emotionally buttoned-up at the posh end, while Daniel Mays, Angela Griffin and Natalie Gumede as Hayley’s predatory aunt, go all out at the other. The end result is predictable but pleasant.

Which is more than can be said about the aptly titled and extraordinarily tasteless Violent Night. Deliberately drawing on elements of Home Alone and Die Hard, it sees the wealthy occupants of a mansion coming under attack from armed robbers, led by the machinegun-toting ‘Mr Scrooge’ (John Leguizamo). He’s after the millions of dollars he believes are hidden in the basement, and he doesn’t care how many people he kills.

The big twist is that Santa (David Harbour) is also trapped in the house. And not just any old department-store Santa but the real one, who may be a disillusioned drunk but he still has a magic sack and a list of who’s been naughty or nice. He also used to be a murderous, hammer-swinging Viking. Let bloody battle commence.

There are some funny lines but this is a cheap-looking production full of unfamiliar faces in which the body count and violence are simply too much.

Normally, I rather warm to the quirky, off-beat American dramas made by Noah Baumbach, but White Noise is too mannered and unresolved, despite perfectly watchable performances by Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig.

Its heightened dramatic style brings to mind Wes Anderson. An adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel, it sees Jack and Babbette Gladney and their precocious blended family of children confronting love, fear of death, infidelity and a big toxic cloud. God knows what Netflix subscribers will make of it.

Guy Pearce is perhaps best known for Memento, and there are echoes of it in The Infernal Machine, with Pearce playing a reclusive British writer trying to make sense of a mysterious stream of letters and packages he keeps receiving at his Californian desert hideaway.

It’s a moody slow-burner, where a melodramatic, Hitchcockian climax – not to mention Pearce’s unexplained Northern accent – slightly detract from the serious hard work that’s been put in before.