Since leaving New York in 2005, Woody Allen has been collecting Euro-stamps like a Contiki tourist on a Five-Countries highlight package. This time it's Italy and the theme, not surprisingly, is love. We're welcomed by a thoughtful traffic officer who introduces the cast, their quandaries and quirks. There's an American tourist whose Roman romance leads her father (Woody Allen) to a shower-singing opera-star in the making. There's a crisis of mistaken identity when a hooker (Penelope Cruz) steps in for a missing wife. Roberto Benigni becomes an unlikely media star loved by all, while Alec Baldwin gives advice to love-struck Jesse Eisenberg.

These artlessly unconnected stories, sketches really, propose rumination about the burning question of love as Allen trots out a familiar assortment of ticks and tropes, characters and caricatures: his trademark anxiety is found in three - count 'em, three - performances and looks uncomfortably like self-parody. Most threads have their moments. Cruz's hooker is a delight as is Benigni's farcical elevation to cultural phenomenon at the hands of insatiable media. Allen's determination to release the inner-opera is clever but slight, while Eisenberg's scenes are neither of these things although, paradoxically, the only offering any kind of insight.

Although To Rome With Love offers a good number of laughs as it meanders through the Eternal City, it lacks the clarity or assurance of Midnight In Paris (itself a thin conceit lets not forget). It is as if Allen didn't really know what to do with his rabble of Romans once he got them. Certainly no time was spent fleshing out ideas that could have brought greater depth to the vignettes than a handful of jokes which soon wear thin. Perhaps Woody was too busy working up next years project. Whatever the reason, To Rome With Love fails its early promise as it quickly reduces to an amiable but superficial distraction.

// COLIN FRASER
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