Twenty years ago no one could even spell it. Today “dysfunctional” defines the dramatis personae and dynamic of almost every American film about families made for less than $100m. Above that sum a director must keep smiling to entice the customers. Below it, as in Margot at the Wedding, Noah Baumbach’s sequel-in-kind to his admired The Squid and the Whale, he can depict the nasty and neurotic with unmitigated élan. Sundance will swoon; critics will praise the director’s queasy candour; the cocktail classes will chatter of Strindberg and O’Neill.

Yet surely Baumbach is laying it on thick – too thick – in this tale of a writer (Nicole Kidman) arriving with her Oedipally troubled son (Zane Pais) at the coastal home of her sister (Jennifer Jason Leigh), on the eve of sis’s marriage to a clownish, circumferentially challenged manic depressive (Jack Black).