Stalking. Fat jokes. A very white Notting Hill: Have Richard Curtis’s films aged horribly?

The British filmmaker behind romcoms including ‘Four Weddings’, ‘Love Actually’ and ‘Bridget Jones’ has spent the last few years lambasting his own work for its un-diverse casting and primordial gags about women with ‘sizeable arses’ and ‘huge thighs’. But critics have always had their knives out for his movies, writes Geoffrey Macnab – often overlooking their witty, charming genius

Love offensively: Hugh Grant and Martine McCutcheon in Richard Curtis’s 2003 problematic Christmas classic ‘Love Actually’ (Shutterstock)

The knives have been out for Richard Curtis’s movies recently – and the one who’s most often wielded the blade has been Curtis himself. In a series of interviews, the writer-director of some of Britain’s best-loved romcoms (Notting Hill, Love Actually, Four Weddings and a Funeral) has been slashing at his own work.

Earlier this month at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, while being grilled by his daughter, Scarlett, Curtis issued several mea culpas: for the lack of people of colour in Notting Hill, and for the fat jokes in Love Actually (re-released next month to mark its 20th anniversary) and Bridget Jones’s Diary. He labelled himself “stupid and wrong”. This isn’t the first time that Curtis has called himself out. “The lack of diversity makes me feel uncomfortable and a bit stupid,” he commented in a TV special about Love Actually broadcast in the US last year. Speaking to podcaster Craig Oliver also last year, Curtis said that his children “don’t like 20 per cent of my jokes because they think they are old-fashioned and wrong somehow.”

Loop back in time to 1994, though, and you will find plenty of brickbats being thrown at Curtis – and his just-released Four Weddings and a Funeral – even then, although not by himself. Four Weddings, which Curtis scripted but was directed by Mike Newell, had been very warmly received in the US at the Sundance Film Festival, but certain reviewers were immediately hostile when it surfaced a few months later in the UK.