A couple of touching moments aside, Valentine’s Day is as blatantly engineered and resolutely frothy as mid-February date movies get.

A couple of touching moments aside, Valentine’s Day is as blatantly engineered and resolutely frothy as mid-February date movies get.

A serviceable but uninspired romantic comedy with a familiar fishes-out-of-water backdrop.

Independently and internationally produced CG animated comedy Planet 51 has the visuals to compare with bigger budgeted Hollywood studio offerings but not the storytelling spark.

A Christmas Carol is an engaging and relatively dark take on a seasonal classic that finds director Robert Zemeckis refining the performance capture animation technique he used to mixed effect on The Polar Express and Beowulf.

Over-acting is endemic. Quaid can’t do much with his very limited role, and Foster seems miscast.

While the film isn’t as consistently funny as Borat, Bruno should still pull in a sizeable audience.

An awkwardly structured but warmly emotional and relatively unsentimental drama.

Sweet yet slight.

None of the actors has much to work with but Worthington and Yelchin manage to give their characters some appeal. Bale’s Connor is too gruff and one-note to be of much interest.

Starts unpromisingly but ends up, thanks largely to co-star Jennifer Garner, being briefly affecting.

A self-consciously crazy action romp which overdoses on cartoonish violence and non-PC comedy.

As a study of two apparently dissimilar men trying to find their way in the world, The Soloist works fairly well.

Ambitious but overwrought.

A Judd Apatow-esque mix of the buddy and romantic comedy genres, I Love You, Man hits the funny bone often if never particularly hard.

Even avid fans of the classic video game on which it is based are likely to give a thumbs down to Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li.

Muscular but pretty unimaginative.

Even with Doomsday's Rhona Mitra as a replacement sultry presence, it's likely to disappoint the franchise's core audience of young males.

What follows has the comforting predictability that many rom-coms share.

While kids will get a few giggles out of this scattershot Disney fantasy-comedy, adults probably won't find much to laugh at.

After its breezy first act the film goes into a second act that's intended to be darker and more dramatic but doesn't convince on either count.

A slow, improbable and very mawkish drama.

The standout acting performance comes from Wright, who, though he doesn't look particularly like Waters, captures some of the singer's physicality and delivers some poignant moments as the great bluesman begins to lose his commercial mojo.

Four rounds of family festivities produce very little merriment for either its protagonists or audiences.

The sequel to DreamWorks' computer-animated family hit Madagascar offers more drama and a lot more animals but fewer laughs and not quite as much fun as the colourful summer 2005 original.

The film settles into a pattern of predictable romance interspersed, thanks to the antics of Priya's relations, with broad family farce.

While it doesn't work particularly well on any of those levels, it is a colourful addition to the always popular talking dog genre.