That Awkward Moment review

That Awkward Moment (15/R, 94 mins)
Director: Tom Gormican
★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

High School Musical star Zac Efron goes potty-mouthed in this thoroughly charmless rom-com. He’s one of three pals (along with Miles Teller and Michael B. Jordan) who form a pact to enjoy their single lives and not get involved in a relationship. This is complicated when Efron starts to fall for Imogen Poots, who he seems able to make laugh, but not the audience. Everything about this dismal effort is crude and manufactured and comedy-free, improvised by actors not really skilled enough to get away with it. It’s unpleasant characters indulging in moronic behaviour and lies, with clear signs from the start where they're all going to end up, but giving us nothing to care about while we get there.

The Decoy Bride review

The Decoy Bride (12A, 89 mins)
Director: Sheree Folkson

★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

When a big movie star (Alice Eve), due to marry David Tennant’s writer, gets sick of always being hounded by paparazzi, they head somewhere remote to get married in peace and end up on the fictional Hebridean island of Hegg. There Katie (Kelly Macdonald) is a lovelorn singleton who gets roped into being a decoy to divert the press, and she and Tennant get rather arbitrarily shoved together while the real bride goes missing. With a nice light tone that’s frothy without being too zany, this is a predictable and undemanding bit of fluff that’s inoffensive enough but all just a bit wet and underdeveloped, with little reason to invest in the circumstances. Macdonald shows a real flair for light comedy but Tennant is out of his depth and essentially it’s proof that Britain is every bit as capable of making insipid rom-com fare as Hollywood.

New Year’s Eve review

New Year’s Eve (12A/PG-13, 118 mins)
Director: Garry Marshall

★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

An in-concept only follow up to Valentine’s Day, this hideous romantic comedy tracks what appears to be several thousand different characters on a New York New Year’s Eve, taking in births, deaths and marriages, with many of them orbiting Jon Bon Jovi’s rock star, due to play a gig at Times Square where most of them end up gathering. Returning players such as Jessica Biel and Ashton Kutcher take on entirely different characters from those in Valentine’s Day, while the likes of Robert De Niro, Halle Berry and Sarah Jessica Parker get roped into feeble situations constructed with the most flat and uninspired direction and acting imaginable. With an alarming dearth of laughs when it’s not being cloying and obvious, it soon progresses from just being bad to active incompetence, made with a complete lack of care and attention. The only remotely tolerable thread involves Zac Efron helping out Michelle Pfeiffer’s dowdy office worker, but they're forced too frequently to make way for the rest of a catastrophe that makes Valentine’s Day look like His Girl Friday.

What’s Your Number? review

What’s Your Number? (15/R, 106 mins)
Director: Mark Mylod
★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

Recently fired Ally (Anna Faris) doesn’t have a boyfriend, but has no trouble finding someone to spend the night with. After reading a magazine article, she becomes concerned about the number of guys she’s slept with, and vows to marry the next one so that her number of sexual partners doesn’t go above 20. But to achieve this, she needs to find a husband from one of her exes, and enlists the help of her neighbour (Chris Evans) to track them down. It’s a dopey and arbitrary setup, initially a wasteland, so that a couple of reels in we’re still none the wiser as to what it’s actually about, and it’s further held back by a black-hole subplot that takes in Ally’s sister’s wedding. It warms up to an extent when the stars share screen-time, and Faris is game while Evans encroaches on Ryan Reynolds’ charming cad territory to reasonable effect, but they're mostly working with dregs here. Out of nowhere it pulls a couple of silly laughs out of the bag, such as Ally flashing back to some of her exes, particularly when she pretended she was British to impress Martin Freeman, but like most recent comedies, it prefers to deal in crudity in lieu of wit.

You Instead review

You Instead (15, 80 mins)

Director: David Mackenzie

★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

Filmed entirely at the T in the Park festival in 2010, this underwhelming drama breaks into a story of sorts when a member of an American band ends up handcuffed to a British girl for a night of incidents and arguments that follows rom-com conventions. It’s a plot device you might see on a children’s TV drama, and one that lends itself to little of interest. The sheer scale of the endeavour makes it visually arresting, and it has a certain grungy charm and a couple of moments of spontaneous fun, but mostly it’s just a bunch of annoying people in the mud and rain. It’s not a film, it’s a companion piece for festivalgoers, an experiment to see if a movie can be shot in a couple of days. In that regard, at least it’s been proven that it can’t.

Life As We Know It review

Life As We Know It (12A, 114 mins)
Director: Greg Berlanti
★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

We’re on the rom-com trail once again, this time with Josh Duhamel and Katherine Heigl as our would-be romantic pairing whom we initially meet when they're set up on a disastrous blind date by mutual friends. This was some years earlier and they now treat each other as good natured antagonists who suddenly find themselves thrown together by a slightly tasteless twist of fate that sees their friends die and them named as joint guardians of their one year old baby. This means moving into their friends’ house, where they must contend with the usual nappy and feeding escapades that represent the movie at its most painful. It’s otherwise made palatable by more or less believable and likeable characters, with Duhamel as a sort of low rent Timothy Olyphant offering better value than he did in the atrocious When In Rome from earlier this year, while Heigl has been nowhere near this appealing since Knocked Up. But it can swing from tragic to kooky in the space of a scene, there’s never any doubt where it’s heading and it takes an awfully long time to get there.

Going the Distance review

Going the Distance (15, 102 mins)
Director: Nanette Burstein

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

In the league table of romantic comedy stars, if Sandra Bullock is Chelsea and Gerard Butler is relegation fodder, Drew Barrymore regularly hovers around mid-table, possibly underachieving. With the help of her co-star here, Justin Long, she might make it into a European spot this season.

We’ve seen Barrymore and Long in the same movie before, in last year’s ensemble effort, He’s Just Not That Into You, though they didn’t share any scenes. It’s their chemistry together here as a couple trying to make a relationship work on either side of the United States that elevates Going the Distance from run of the mill to really quite appealing.

As we meet New Yorker Garrett (Long), he’s in the process of being dumped for being an inattentive boyfriend. Barrymore’s Erin meanwhile is spending the summer in New York as an intern at a newspaper. They hook up in a bar and really hit it off, but she’s leaving in six weeks to go back to California.

They agree they’ll give a long distance relationship a go, and as the months roll by they stay in touch through phone calls and the occasional get together. Throwing down their main obstacle early makes for an involving setup, and things chug along nicely for a while but there has to be an escalation in conflict and as it gets more and more difficult for them to be apart, their future together looks starts to bleak.

Rom-coms seem to come from a production line these days, with the characters generally having kooky jobs and best friends on hand to offer zany counsel. Going the Distance is no different, but it is more honest and truthful than most, and unlike many recent efforts gives us characters who are easy to root for, which goes a long way.

That’s helped by the likeable stars, with Barrymore coming across as breezy and smart. Long goes full Schwimmer in his bid to be as sweet and charming as possible, although stooping to nicking the tanning booth mishap gag from Friends is a bit much.

That’s part of what doesn’t work here, with a couple of the set pieces becoming a bit laboured when we were doing just fine with the engaging characters. And unusually for this type of film it’s got quite a lot of adult content, chock full of swearing and raunchy scenes rather than aiming for the teen crowd.

Though it does kind of put all its eggs in the one plot basket, with characters and subplots left dangling, at least it manages to steer clear of the dopey misunderstandings that frequently blight such movies. It’s may not quite be Champions League material but everyone can be happy with their effort.

The Switch review

The Switch (12A, 101 mins)
Directors: Josh Gordon, Will Speck

★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

Jason Bateman and Jennifer Aniston are platonic friends who hit a snag when she announces she wants a baby through artificial insemination and finds a donor in Patrick Wilson. Thanks to a moronic chain of events, Bateman drunkenly replaces Wilson’s sample with his own so that when Aniston turns up seven years later with a son in tow who’s as odd and neurotic as he is, Bateman finds himself unable to tell her the truth. It would be wrong to label this as a rom-com as it’s not really played for laughs except when their respective friends are at hand to offer pithy advice, and though not too objectionable, it’s just a bit stale with little character momentum driving it forward. It’s usually hard to go too far wrong with the likes of Bateman and Aniston at the helm, but it’s such an ill-advised idea to begin with that they're mostly powerless to save it.

The Rebound review

The Rebound (15, 95 mins)
Director: Bart Freundlich

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

Like Julia Roberts and J-Lo in recent months, Catherine Zeta Jones makes her big screen return after a lengthy absence in this agreeable romantic drama. She plays Sandy, a forty-ish mother of two who moves with her kids to the city after leaving her cheating husband and begins a relationship with mid-twenties Aram (Justin Bartha). Everything seems to be going well for a while, but will their age difference get in the way? The Rebound is rare among recent rom-coms in that is has a modicum of intelligence about it to go alongside characters we actually care about. It tosses up some believable situations, some daft ones and even a few laughs, but lets itself down when it goes for the more obvious jokes and gross-out moments. But while it’s far from perfect, a measure of maturity and taste means that a genre starved of even remotely tolerable entries for a while now can at least face itself in the mirror again.

Heartbreaker review

Heartbreaker (15, 105 mins)
Director: Pascal Chalmeuil

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

A huge hit in its native France, this breezy comedy stars Romain Duris as a smooth operator who breaks couples up for a living by seducing the woman and showing her how unhappy she is. When he’s hired by the father of Vanessa Paradis and given only a few days to make her call off her wedding, he’s unwilling to take the job as he believes she's happy, but as he owes 30,000 Euros to a gangster he’s in no position to argue. Heartbreaker is fun if over-egged, with some superfluous set pieces but also a certain energy and enough disguises, caper stings and comical Dirty Dancing-inspired moments to keep the attention for the first two thirds. But it runs out of puff and invention, dragging its heels for the final stretch and there’s never any doubt where it’s headed.

When In Rome review

When In Rome (PG, 90 mins)
Director: Mark Steven Johnson
★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

This stupefying fantasy rom-com stars Sarah Marshall herself, Kristen Bell, as Beth, a workaholic who goes to Italy for her sister’s wedding where she takes a shine to the groom’s best man (Josh Duhamel). She also takes some coins from the Fountain of Love, the legend telling that doing so means the person who threw it in will fall in love with you. As luck would have it, each of the coin owners lives in New York, and stalk Beth while she and Duhamel gambol through various misunderstandings. Sticking closely to the kind of moronic template that typifies the 21st century romantic comedy, this is remarkably dippy stuff that’s marginally less hateful than some examples of this doomed genre, but it’s still hard to care whether Beth gets the man of her dreams or drowns in the fountain.

Killers review

Killers (12A, 100 mins)
Director: Robert Luketic

★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

Essentially taking the basic plot of True Lies and stripping it of all wit and invention, Killers is a dull plod through a succession of badly written setups that, for a lightweight action comedy, is nowhere near breezy enough, and offers a dearth of laughs or rousing conflict.

It kicks off with singleton Jen (Katherine Heigl) on holiday in France with her overbearing parents (Tom Selleck and Catherine O’Hara).  She meets the handsome, frequently shirtless Spencer (Ashton Kutcher) whom we know is actually an international assassin there for a job, but who doesn’t tell her that.

Not long after meeting her, and none too believably, he begins to question his career choice and decides he wants a normal life. So, back in the States, and a quick jump to three years later, they're happily married and living in suburbia with Jen still having no idea that Spencer used to be a hired killer. But just when he thought he was out, they pull him back in, with his old handler telling him if he doesn’t do another job, there’ll be a bounty on him, and seemingly every one of his neighbours could be out to kill him.

Little about Killers works. There’s not really much going for it in the early stages except some nice French scenery, followed by a black hole in the middle where absolutely nothing happens for a good half of the film’s running time. Then it turns frenzied for an all-action final stretch that becomes little more than a series of shoot outs and car chases and throws in a couple of Bourne style fight scenes only without the necessary expertise.

A subpar level of scriptwriting should take the blame for most of the problems, with Jen and Spencer going from deliriously happy to bored to bickering without once coming close to believable. Throw in characters who are barely introduced but yet later become pivotal, farcical coincidences and revelations that make no sense whatsoever and you’re left with a clumsy mess.

Kutcher shows more charm than he usually manages, but unfortunately he’s dragged back by Heigl who, reuniting with her director from The Ugly Truth last year, proves that her unappealing turn in that catastrophe was no fluke. But worst of all, the genuinely good actors in O’Hara and Selleck are wasted, her only character trait being that’s she’s a lush, his that he has a Tom Selleck moustache.

Letters to Juliet review

Letters to Juliet (PG, 105 mins)
Director: Gary Winick
★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

 Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) is an aspiring writer on holiday in Verona with her fiancé (Gael Garica Bernal), a food obsessed chef more interested in pasta than her. With plenty time to explore the city on her own, she finds herself at Juliet’s house where the lovelorn write letters to Shakespeare’s most famous heroine. When she replies to a 50 year old letter, Vanessa Redgrave arrives from England and they go in search of the man she knew when she was teenager, bringing along her grandson along to add a romantic complication for Sophie. Taking place in a fantasy Italy, this is fluffy, bland and inoffensive, with no forward momentum to speak of and no real interest in who Sophie ends up with. One for hopeless romantics only or those with a pathological aversion to the World Cup.

She’s Out of My League review

She’s Out of My League (15, 104 mins)
Director: Jim Field Smith
★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

The latest spin on the boy-meets-girl formula is this likeable boy-thinks-he-doesn’t-deserve-girl romantic comedy. Kirk (Jay Baruchel, last spotted voicing the young hero in How to Train Your Dragon) is still in mourning for the girl he broke up with two years before when he meets the stunning Molly (Alice Eve) through his job at airport security. He’s a bit of a goofball but he’s a nice, funny guy who can’t believe she likes him, and so constantly thinks she’s out of his league, which forms the basis for the sometimes contrived conflict. It’s a premise that’s stretched out a little too thinly on occasion in a movie that stalls a bit when going for gross or farcical situations, particularly when dealing with Kirk’s boorish friends and insane family. But it’s sweet, sometimes very funny and most of all, Kirk and Molly are a couple to root for which means it’s built on solid foundations.

The Back-Up Plan review

The Back-Up Plan (12A, 104 mins)
Director: Alan Poul

★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Jennifer Lopez here takes on her first major role in five years and serves to do little more than demonstrate that we didn’t really miss her. The pitch of this woeful comedy is that she becomes pregnant through artificial insemination on the same day that she meets the guy of her dreams (Alex O'Loughlin). It’s a movie that adheres only to the most tired of rom-com elements like the less attractive best friend, the kooky jobs (she owns a pet store, he makes cheese) and the music to let us when something romantic or comedic is supposed to be happening, and neglects everything that makes the genre greats of yore so successful – the interesting characters and situations, charismatic actors and a modicum of interest in whether they end up together through well developed obstacles and believable conflict. By only ever going for the most obvious setups and punchlines, The Back-Up Plan once again proves that the romantic comedy is as dead as Dillinger.