Valentine's Day

Directed by Garry Marshall

(PG-13)

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Valentine’s Day is a romantic comedy without any romance or comedy, said John Anderson in The Wall Street Journal. In this “atrocity,” director Garry Marshall—the softie who brought us Beaches and Pretty Woman—deploys every one of the genre’s clichés, shamelessly casting a bouquet of bankable A- and B-listers to do his dirty work.

Julia Roberts, Jennifer Garner, and Ashton Kutcher are among the 23 actors shuffled into shorts about love gone right and wrong on one Valentine’s Day in Los Angeles, said Lisa Schwarzbaum in Entertainment Weekly. Their beautiful faces are supposed to make us forget that “every line of dialogue is lame, every joke falls flat, and every performance has been phoned in, between text messages to agents blinking ‘SOS!’”

With so many stars and subplots, Valentine’s Day is like a “200-piece Whitman’s sampler,” said Dana Stevens in Slate.com. But who needs so much candy that “you want to discard after the first bite”?