Feelgood factors

Set in the weeks running up to Christmas and driven by the romantic ideal that love is not lost, the eagerly awaited comedy Love Actually's worldwide box-office success is pretty much predestined - whatever the critics may say.

It's Richard Curtis's directorial debut but his previous screenplays for Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Bean, and Bridget Jones's Diary, have already marked him down as one of cinema's eternal optimists, along with filmmakers Nora Ephron, Cameron Crowe and Frank Darabont.

Critics sometimes hate this stuff, but audiences lap it up. After all, cinema prides itself on Utopian warmth, allowing us for a brief moment to forget ourselves. It's that Paradise Found moment.

Love Actually joins a long list of famous feelgood movies - It's a Wonderful Life, Singin' in the Rain, Casablanca, Shawshank Redemption, Dirty Dancing, Billy Elliot, The Sound of Music - which "take us out of ourselves".

I'd augment these with a quirkier strain of optimistic films: the recent documentary Etre et Avoir, Almost Famous, the Western Rio Bravo, Yasujiro Ozu's I Was Born But ... and David Lynch's Straight Story. These, even more than some of the others, afford the pure pleasure of self-dissolution.

It's as if mainstream filmmakers, as do many religions, believe in a place where things are perfect.