Fittingly, there are a couple of continental romantic comedies on offer this Valentine weekend. You may have to travel to find them, but - if you like your love stories to combine cornball and kook- you could do a lot worse than seek out Emmanuel Mouret's Change of Address and Maciek Zak's Midnight Talks.

There are few better people to crib a romcom off than Woody Allen and Eric Rohmer, and Emmanuel Mouret blends their respective wit and insight to amusing effect in his astute treatise on emotional manners. With Mouret's provincial French horn player besotted with student Fanny Valette and Parisian flatmate Frédérique Bel fixated on an elusive customer at her photocopy shop, the path of true love inevitably runs anything but smoothly - especially once restaurateur Dany Brilliant seeks to renew his acquaintance with the taciturn Valette.

But it's the byplay between Mouret and Bel that gives the brisk scenario its appeal, with Bel particularly engaging as the oddball whose ditziness masks a fragility that the nebbish Mouret is too self-obsessed to notice, even after they tumble into bed following an instantly regretted heart-to-heart.

Thirtysomethings Magdalena Rózczka and Marcin Dorocinski similarly take their time succumbing to their feelings in Midnight Talks, a thoroughly predictable, but irresistibly sweet Polish comedy that is ably played by its impossibly beautiful leads. Down on men, but determined to have a baby, Rózczka advertises for a potential father in the paper and is surprised that chef Dorocinski would need to resort to the personal column. However, he is shy and hen-pecked by his mother, Joanna Zólkowska, who lives in the flat next door. Furthermore, he is uncomfortable with Rózczka's suggestion that they part after she becomes pregnant and they spend the next nine months deliberating about whether to become an item.

With Weronika Ksiazkiewicz and Roma Gasiorowska respectively having love troubles as Rózczka's promiscuous flatmate and the elfin waitress at Dorocinski's restaurant, this genre savvy offering rarely departs from the Hollywood formula. But Maciek Zak eschews sentimentality in making both Rózczka's model angel maker and Dorocinski's wannabe cookbook writer eminently sympathetic, even though his timidity occasionally grates and there's sometimes a contrived wilfulness to her independent streak.

Debuting director Jonathan Levine also plays with audience expectation in All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, a variation on the teens in peril schlocker that is sufficiently confident in its execution to excuse the outrageous deception at its denouement. That said, the beginning is also pretty audacious, as high school geek Michael Welch persuades jock Adam Powell that the only way he'll impress athletic new girl Amber Heard is by diving into the pool from the roof during a house party.

With Heard now refusing to speak to Welch, the action fast forwards to the summer and Heard agrees to spend a weekend at the remote ranch of spoilt nerd Aaron Himelstein, along with cocky Luke Grimes, black hunk Edwin Hodge, slutty Melissa Price and uncool Whitley Able. Naturally, the lads have a bet who can seduce Heard first and, just as predictably, she only seems to have eyes for Anson Mount, the ranch hand who just happens to be a Gulf War veteran.

The first couple of slayings feel like examples from a screenwriting textbook. But Levine tosses in the first of his red herrings and then adroitly draws the viewer in for the sucker punch. It's a shame the postmodern twist is utterly devoid of narrative or psychological logic, but when was horror ever rational?