Movies are from Earth, “Valentine’s Day” is from Mars. “Valentine’s Day” is a strained romcom drawn from disparate strands, like hair in the drain after a shower, or spaghetti in the sink strainer the morning after pasta. “Valentine’s Day” is a delivery vehicle for the coming attractions for “Sex and the City 2.” “Valentine’s Day” stars Jessica Alba, Kathy Bates, Jessica Biel, Bradley Cooper, Eric Dane, Patrick Dempsey, Hector Elizondo, Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Garner, Topher Grace, Anne Hathaway, Ashton Kutcher, Queen Latifah, Taylor Lautner, George Lopez, Shirley MacLaine, Emma Roberts, Julia Roberts, Taylor Swift, Larry Miller, Serena Poon, Paul Williams, Tracy Reiner, Hannah Storm, Rance Howard and Kiko Kiko. “Valentine’s Day” has so many roles for nondescript actors with only a single line, you know the director has lots of friends who need to renew their SAG qualifications to keep their health insurance. “Valentine’s Day” is a feat of production management: all those actors show up for only a few hours and their scenes are intercut and you’ve got “Grand Hotel.” “Valentine’s Day” is so teemingly unfunny, it’s more like “Roach Motel.” “Valentine’s Day” makes kissing look unpleasant, desire mechanical, saccharine a kind of soma. “Valentine’s Day,” its director brags, was made quickly, cheaply, for “under $50 million.” “Valentine’s Day” demonstrates that “cheap” is a set of mind, not a price tag. “Valentine’s Day” was co-written by the team behind “He’s Just Not That Into You.” “Valentine’s Day” shows that “He’s Just Not That Into You” had a real director behind the camera. “Valentine’s Day” is directed by Garry Marshall, known for “Laverne and Shirley,” “Pretty Woman,” “The Princess Diaries” and the Dan Aykroyd-Rosie O’Donnell S&M comedy “Exit to Eden.” Wait, Garry Marshall is still alive? In the inevitable, inexorable blooper reel under the credits, Taylor Swift has an affectedly unaffected riff with Taylor Lautner that would charm the socks off an old man. “Valentine’s Day,” to paraphrase 1980s power-punk group Gang Of Four, is like V.D., you wouldn’t want to catch that. 125m. (Ray Pride)

Director John Lee Hancock (“The Alamo,” “The Rookie”) writes an uplift drama based on “The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game,” a 2006 book by Michael Lewis about Michael Oher’s rise from the mean streets of Memphis to a five-year, $13.8-million contract with the Baltimore Ravens. Quinton Aaron (“Q” from “Be Kind Rewind”) plays this giant teen as sweet and shutdown. He’s a rescue by Leigh Anne and Sean Tuohy (Sandra Bullock and Tim McGraw, respectively). This well-off couple brings him home, after seeing him walking along a rainy road one night. “Big Mike” goes to the same private Christian school as their daughter. A one-night stay on the couch leads to legal guardianship, better grades, football glory and courtship by college coaches. “The Blind Side” portrays the Touhys as a personable family, except for the obnoxious son played by Jae Head. Bullock appeals as another plucky can-do gal. “The Blind Side” comes soon after the release of “Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire,” another account of an African-American adolescent overcoming heartbreaking obstacles. Oher’s story is measurably lighter. Lewis wrote that Oher scored in the ninetieth percentile for “protective instincts.” Hancock increases this to the ninety-eighth. (Who knew the Memphis school system ranked kids by their instincts?) This may explain his stats as a left tackle, thanks to Leigh Anne coaching him that his team is like his new family. The cringe factor is less than you’d expect, although the gradually more graphic flashbacks to Oher’s childhood trauma are cliched. Hancock congratulates the Touhys for their charity and does not get sacked for it. With Lily Collins, Kathy Bates, Ray McKinnon, Adriane Lenox and eight coaches as themselves. 126m. (Bill Stamets)

Director Stephen Frears (“Dangerous Liaisons”) and screenwriter Christopher Hampton (“Dangerous Liaisons”) delectably adapt “Cheri” (1920) and “The Last of Chéri” (1926), novels of risqué manners by French writer Colette about a six-year affair between 49-year-old Léa (Michelle Pfeiffer, “Dangerous Liaisons”) and 19-year-old Chéri (Rupert Friend, “The Libertine.”) “My aim is a true mental hermaphroditism,” announced this versatile demimondaine (1873- 1954) whose literary output included a screenplay for Louis Feuillade and another for Max Ophuls. She once played her Lea in a stage version of “Chéri” and later pursued an affair with her 18-year-old stepson. In an admiring diagnosis, psychoanalytical feminist critic Julia Kristeva wrote: “her alphabet of the world is an alphabet of feminine pleasure”; Colette “sought to immerse herself in a singular orgasm with the world’s flesh.” “Chéri” is a sensual ethnography of Belle Epoque courtesans-sybarites as scented class parasites. Cinematographer Darius Khondji and composer Alexandre Desplat prettify this putrefying cul-de-sac of calculating entrepreneurs and epicures. The “courtesy of” credits source the period jewelry, furs, pearls, luggage, linen and pastries to tony au courant outlets. “Chéri” visits a savory life to die for, as the title lover gets his just dessert in an existential coda. With Kathy Bates, Felicity Jones, Frances Tomelty, Anita Pallenberg, Harriet Walter 92m. Anamorphic 2.40 widescreen. (Bill Stamets)

RECOMMENDED

Fans of Richard Yates’ elegant, cold-hearted, bitter, angry, unforgettable novel have begun pouring out reminiscences of discovering its brutal charms while summering at writers’ colonies and inveighing against its screen adaptation (written by Justin Haythe, directed by Sam Mendes). “Revolutionary Road” is a great novel, but so acid that to fully reflect Yates’ brimstone would be near unendurable. While the death of dreams is one of Yates’ subjects, Mendes’ version more reflects the death of a marriage in suburban 1955. Leonardo DiCaprio captures a certain amount of doubt in his playing of Frank Wheeler, but it’s Kate Winslet who embodies fearfulness and a bite of madness with essential gestures. It’s a tremendous performance, capturing timorousness but also a streak of desperation borne of inchoate miseries (whether of will or failure of will or incipient madness). Michael Shannon plays a neighbor’s son, briefly brought out of the madhouse to speak unspoken tensions, a crackling performance: “You want to play house, you’ve got to have a job; you want to play very nice house, very sweet house, then you’ve got to have a job you don’t like. Anyone comes along and says ‘What do you do it for?,’ he’s probably on a four-hour pass from the state funny farm. Agreed?” Zoe Kazan’s quiet sleepwalker of an office co-worker who cheats with Frank is more graceful and equally compelling. Some of the most combative scenes draw almost exclusively from Yates’ written dialogue, with word changes for economy more than “updating.” I’m fond of Thomas Newman’s scores, but this is one is far more foreboding than, say, for “Wall-E” or “American Beauty.” As shot by Roger Deakins, Mendes’ camera style is simplified, often choosing a more theatrical, tableau-style presentation than working with editing or extended camera moves, a choice that highlights performances down to the cold, cold final shot drawn directly from the novel. With Kathy Bates. 119m. (Ray Pride)

Green to an extreme, this “re-imagining” of the 1951 sci-fi film updates its Cold War backdrop. In the original “The Day The Earth Stood Still,” directed by Robert Wise, an egghead alien brings news that in his sector of the cosmos, they invented robots to detect aggression and annihilate aggressors. Our atomic bellicosity would soon put Earth under this galactic pact, like it or not. Keanu Reeves deploys his quasi-autistic chops to play Klaatu, the visiting alien pursued by the feds, but aided and abetted by an astrobiologist (Jennifer Connelly, who earlier played a research scientist in “Hulk.”) Director Scott Derrickson (“The Exorcism of Emily Rose”) and writer David Scarpa go for generic sci-fi thriller impact. In the midst of the ultimate life-form reboot, Klaatu opts to reverse Earth’s de-evolution. For an advanced being, he cancels this Earth-Delete command on empirically dubious grounds: observing an astrobiologist bond with her stepson (Jaden Smith, “The Pursuit of Happyness”), who wishes death to all aliens and misses his dad, an engineer slain in Iraq. Klaatu’s initial diagnosis—”The problem is you. You lack the will to change. You treat the world as you treat each other”—echoes the message of a short film made by Edmund H. North, the writer of the 1951 screenplay inspired by a story by Harry Bates. In 1982 North made “Race to Oblivion” for the L.A. chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility. “We’ve been killing everything/ Man and nature too,” sing a chorus of kids. Host Burt Lancaster intones: “You and I are the trustees of the human gene pool.” This new “Day” shows how “The 11th Hour” would go down with locust-like swarms of metallic nano-mites digesting humanity, high-rises and eighteen-wheelers. With Kathy Bates, John Cleese, Jon Hamm, Kyle Chandler. 104m. (Bill Stamets)

By Ray Pride

Television producer-writer Diane English makes her directorial debut at the age of 60, a rare privilege for someone who’s never directed anything, on a project she claims to have been working on in the earliest years of the Clinton administration. (It may be one of the most ramshackle movies made by a major studio since the early 1990s as well.)

While softening George Cukor’s 1939 cat-fest of the same name, which also featured, in Clare Booth Luce’s script from her own play, the conceit of having no men on screen (unless you count a Santa caricature on the door of a delivery room), English’s comic worldview exists in some vapid netherworld, a freeze-dried, vacuum-sealed perspective that draws mostly from early 1990s sitcom-style delivery, with badinage served with table-tennis-style cutting. (“I am famous for my intolerance!” is a brittle height.) It’s no small wonder that the only actresses who come across with any panache are the pros from television—Cloris Leachman with her immaculate timing and purring intonation as a servant with immaculate timing and Candace Bergen (from English’s “Murphy Brown”) as the protagonist’s foul-mouthed mother.

Oh Meg Ryan. When Meg Met Diane. Meg Ryan, lost under an impossible mess of curls—a cross-breed, say, the “Megoodle”—plays a whiny, selfish, self-lacerating mess whose self-actualization after a series of complications leads her to discover female friendship is the most important thing of all, especially if everyone you embrace is a whiny, selfish, self-lacerating mess, stressed, deeply lonely and desperately wanting to get knocked up to feel complete. The seldom-seen Annette Bening, who could sell the strenuousness of her character in “American Beauty,” is unable to withstand English’s inexperience as a magazine editor whose insufferably, insupportably lame inspirations would not pass muster in a very special episode of “Two And A Half Men.” Fourteen years for this drably lit, unimaginatively framed, edited and decorated bunkum? Mehhhh.

“The Women” has two passages that pass for cinematic image-making. Cukor’s original was shot in black-and-white with the exception of a reel-long fashion show, lit in bright, broad Technicolor swathes. The fashion show here starts as black-and-white before moving to what the characters call “jungle red,” after a favored shade of nail polish. At almost the very end of the film, a helicopter shot swoops over the Hudson River, and standing center frame, tall, bold, timeless, is Lady Liberty. A nice idea for a better film, especially one that did not end, post-credits, with out-of-character interviews with the cast as themselves, reinforcing the up-with-women bromides of co-producer (and featured player) Dove soap.

None of the lighting is flattering to the actresses’ idiosyncratic beauty, let alone their age. A shot of Meg Ryan’s banged-up shins as her character has one of her clichéd panic attacks while atop an overstuffed bed is one of the few milliseconds that suggested experience, beauty and even, dare I say, down-to-earth sexiness. Bette Midler has a brief sit-on where she mocks her own delivery style while caricaturing the late, near-forgotten agent Sue Mengers. (She plays hip, as in “surgery.”) Eva Mendes is brought on to shake her rump in expensive lingerie; Debra Messing is a straggled mess of a multiple mom; Jada Pinkett Smith is a lesbian stiletto-cum-essayist and the brilliant Carrie Fisher is unrecognizable. (There’s a weird recurring mention of Bening’s editor having offered an advance for Pinkett Smith’s new book, suggesting some pages of earlier drafts slipped in while no one was looking.)

Music supervisor Chris Douridas slides some gentle pop songs into the mix, but there is one sound issue: an enormous number of shots involve people delivering important lines of dialogue or cracking jokes while their heads are turned away from camera, yet another sign of the film’s troubled production, with ADR (automatic dialogue replacement) of new dialogue in postproduction used to paper over problems in script, blocking and performance.

While I’m one of the great admirers of Bob Berney, the head of Picturehouse, which is extinguished after this release, and the fireworks-bursting logo of which offers a moment of juice at the film’s very start, just before an opening shot of the film proper, that apes the Miramax logo, I have to give more credit to the marketing chops of Lionsgate, which is cannily opening a Tyler Perry picture with Kathy Bates the same weekend as “The Women.”

“The Women” opens Friday.