Love, Rosie

Celia Ahern’s chick-lit novel about two friends who are secretly in love with each other has been made into a not-quite-rubbish Brit romcom. Sam Claflin and Lily Collins are sweet as Rosie and Alex, neighbours who’ve grown up together in London, running around as kids and squeezing each other’s spots. Clearly there’s a spark between them, but hooking up would get in the way of a cheesy will-they-won’t-they (of course they will!) plotline.

After a drunken snog on her eighteenth birthday, the two go their separate ways. Rosie gets pregnant after a one-night-stand with the school sleazeball and brings up her little girl. Alex trains as a doctor in the US. There’s more rom than com here, and it’s all outrageously unrealistic. For a single mum working on the minimum wage as a hotel cleaner, Rosie lives in a swanky flat in what looks like somewhere in London.

It doesn’t help that Claflin and Collins are playing themselves from 18 to 30, putting on goofy faces to act like school kids. Diehard romcom fans will have their socks charmed off, but this is no ‘Notting Hill’.