Valentine's Day DVDs - pick of the new releases

With Valentine's Day just around the corner, the shelves of your local DVD emporium will be positively creaking with chick-flicks designed to make you curl up on the sofa with a box of Maltesers and a loved one.

The first, a sumptuous but mostly saccharine travel pic starring Julia Roberts.

She plays the unhappily married Liz who y pp y ditches her cosy life in the US for a year of wandering. Her first port of call is Italy, where the locals tell her to embrace life through eating. Her next stop is India, where a former alcoholic from Texas (Richard Jenkins) teaches her about spirituality. Lastly, she arrives in Bali and meets a charming local (Javier Bardem) before, literally, sailing into the sunset.
A movie of picture postcard landscapes and hunky blokes, this is cinematic comfort food where the answers to life's problems come a little too neatly gift-wrapped.

Next is The Rebound starring Catherine Zeta-Jones as a mum of two who leaves her cheating husband for a new life in New York City, where she falls for her kids' nanny (Justin Bartha). While it might by have worked as an exploration of how women of a certain age deal with singledom, it fails thanks to a flat script and Zeta-Jones, whose face is as expressive as a satellite dish.

Finally, The Death And Life Of Charlie St Cloud  sees Zac Efron leap from the High School Musical juggernaut to try something a touch more serious. And for those who th ght h ld d g h ' thought he could do no wrong, here's very solid proof to the contrary.