Venus and Mars

Lopes along amiably enough, offering a few smiles and the standard bromides about the importance of being yourself and pursuing your dreams. It's tolerable but forgettable.

The ideal movie for people too lazy to read a Harlequin romance, this by-the-numbers love story doesn't offer a single surprise.

Thesping and production values are solid and sometimes even attractive, but pic's overall American-style gloss becomes extremely odd and discomforting given the setting.

Not exactly terrible, merely stale and pointless.

A mild cross between "The Big Chill" and "Sex and the City," this English-language German oddity is a romantic comedy passing through on its way to video.

Sometimes the predictability of a romantic comedy is reassuring, and sometimes it makes you want to scream, as with this witless wonder.

Painfully contrived, Venus and Mars's dialogue tends toward banal (as opposed to quotably bad), and the rhythm at which lines are read is definitely alien.