Notting Hill

The Four Weddings team produced another smash with this charming tale about a bumbling bookshop owner (Hugh Grant) who falls for the "most famous actress in the world" (Julia Roberts). Inevitably, the course of true love is a bumpy road, with friends, family and a layabout flatmate (played by Rhys Ifans in a career-making performance) getting in the way, but that's the cue for a series of screamingly funny scenarios. Saturated with wit and well directed by Roger Michell, the film was bashed by sceptics for its fluffiness and lack of realism (for a racially mixed area of London, there's not a black face to be seen). But, if you can accept the context as 100 per cent white middle class, with a light-hearted commentary on the nature of celebrity, it's an intensely enjoyable experience.