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Bynes plays 17-year-old New Yorker Daphne, who heads for a fantasy London and the country manor of her long estranged aristocratic father, Henry Dashwood (Firth), who never knew she existed. It’s all culture-clash goofiness from there on. When not trying to fit in or loosening up her dad (cue that air guitar moment) and the toffs-and-tiaras set (“No hugs,” bristles Eileen Atkins as Henry’s reformed-snob mother, “we’re British. We only show affection to dogs and horses”), she’s outsmarting the wicked step-relatives (Anna Chancellor and Jonathan Pryce, no doubt thinking of their pay cheques) and gawking at touristy London with her instant, cute boyfriend, complete with let’s-go-shopping montages.

OK, the film is for Bynes’s teen fans but even they might squirm at the overwrought “you’ve gotta be yourself” message. It’s so predictable — guess if Daphne will reunite her parents and whether Henry will choose political office or being a dad? — that all that’s left to watch is Firth’s innate earnestness sitting uneasily in formulaic fluff and Bynes acting madcap; she’s not as adorable as the movie thinks she is.

Nickelodeon stars also run riot in Rugrats Go Wild, in which the malapropism-spewing toddlers get shipwrecked on the same island as the wildlife-documenting family from their animated stablemate, The Wild Thornberrys. It seems more like gimmicky franchise-stretching desperation than a happy coincidence.

The film is stuffed with slapstick and potty humour — and scratch-and-sniff cards for the smellier moments — for the kids, and quotes from dozens of movies for the parents, including The Poseidon Adventure, Lord of the Flies and Planet of the Apes, but after a while they become wearisome. Some bad songs don’t help, and Bruce Willis provides an inappropriately smug voice for the Rugrats’ befuddled dog Spike; he even duets with singer Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders as a rare leopard with a taste for babies.

Having to track too many characters in pointless plot lines proves exhausting. By the time you get to the obligatory life lessons — spending time with family, learning courage, believing in dreams and becoming “vegetabletarians” — you just don’t care.

Lessons in comic restraint could be learnt by watching Jacques Tati’s Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (1952), rereleased as part of a Tati retrospective at the National Film Theatre in London. A comedy of visual gags, sound effects and half-heard voices, it launched his masterly creation of the innocent, lugubrious blunderer Hulot.

His irrepressible clumsiness at a seaside resort triggers one comic catastrophe after another, from a collapsing kayak that folds in two and nearly swallows him to a spare tyre that becomes a noisy funeral wreath. The film is a masterpiece of underplayed slapstick, observing daily absurdities and reaching a serene acceptance of the vagaries of life.

Restraint also characterises Van Gogh (1991), reissued as a tribute to the French director Maurice Pialat, who died last January. Kirk Douglas in Lust for Life may have turned the artist into an icon of artistic suffering, but Pialat is having none of that. Here we don’t get to see Van Gogh complete a masterpiece, then call up Gauguin for a celebratory absinthe. We see a morose, socially awkward man who just happened to paint.

Despite its length, the film only covers the last three months of the poverty-stricken painter’s life in 1890: his friendship with his patron Dr Gachet; his (invented) affair with the doctor’s daughter; his resentful relationship with his brother, Theo; flings with prostitutes; and his final, ambiguous suicide, which the film attributes to a failure to reconcile his need to paint with his need for friendship.

For the title role Pialat chose Jacques Dutronc, a Dylanesque 1960s pop star, but thankfully he doesn’t pick up a guitar to sing Don McLean’s Vincent. Indeed, Dutronc is the film’s strongest asset, bringing a muted, dishevelled intensity to the part.

But Pialat’s film, capturing the beauty of southern France in scenes inspired by Seurat, Degas, Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec (whom Van Gogh impersonates in mocking, ribald fashion), favours the steady coolness of portraiture, dwelling on faces, gestures and objects, rather than the warmth of drama and veers towards emotional numbness. Yet at least Van Gogh is treated as a human being rather than the ear-slicing loony genius we tend to imagine.

Equally stately but emotionally more involving is Yasujiro Ozu’s The End of Summer (1961), being shown at the Renoir in London to mark the centenary of his birth. The illness and death of an elderly, life-loving patriarch spells the end of a Kyoto family’s brewing business and causes his three daughters to reassess their lives.

What starts out in a light, anecdotal manner gradually gets darker but enhances our understanding of the various relationships and concludes that it is wisest to accept the inevitable. It’s ultimately a bleak story but laced with humour and compassion — it’s Zen kitchen-sink drama at its best.