Love, Rosie

Rom coms are contagious. They make you feel nauseous and then you're sick. Afterwards you feel better and wait for the cliches to anaesthetise you. By the end your critical faculties have melted.

Take a reality pill or you might find this tale of missed opportunities uplifting. Rosie (Lily Collins) and Alex (Sam Claflin) are childhood friends, not lovers, until they reach that age when sex enters the equation.

Alex is the best looking boy in school and clever with it. Also, he's charming. He can't be perfect, surely? Of course, not. His taste in girls is eye candy, the hotter the better, and Rosie isn't like that. She's lovely but doesn't fake it.

After a drunken one night stand with someone else she finds herself preggers and decides to do the Catholic thing, while Alex goes to Harvard where he shacks up with a control freaked nutritionist.

The rest is getting through the years. Exhaustion, single motherhood, working as a cleaner in an hotel for Rosie. Experiencing the American way of corporate castration for Alex.

She never ages despite emotional traumas and a demanding daughter and Alex still looks like a male model although sadder in the eyes after a succession of failed romances.

Will they get together? You hope not because he doesn't deserve her.

Life, like the movies, isn't fair. Pity, really.