When boy-girl best friends get really as close as they can, then it’s always when sex rears its head that things get messy. Alex and Rosie are two bright middle class kinds who do everything together through the years, but by the time it comes to choosing partners for their high school Prom they misread the signs and ask different people to be their dates.  Rosie ends up pregnant, news she keeps from Alex who is about to leave the UK suburbs to take up a scholarship at Harvard.

Through the next decade Rosie struggles with being a single mum taking on jobs cleaning Hotels that she once dreamed of managing whilst Alex shines at his new life in the US that follows his Ivy League education. Each of them get through different partners and even marry them: Rosie to the hunky football jock who had got her pregnant all those years ago, and Alex to the his ex cheerleader blond bombshell girlfriend who he had only dated her as he thought she was out of his league.

What makes this very likable and funny romantic comedy one of the better contemporary examples of this genre are the performances of its two young very attractive stars Lily Collins (Snow White in ‘Mirror Mirror’) who could comfortable dislodge Keira Knightley as the actress-to-go-for in parts like this, and Sam Claflin (Alistair Ryle in ‘The Riot Club’) who could easily be this generation’s Hugh Grant. They effortless transition from teenagers at school to being in their early thirties and have such a remarkable on-screen chemistry that you know whatever dramas they have to live through (and there are a lot) that they are destined to be together. Shout out too for Jaime Winstone (daughter of Ray) for her impressive turn as Rosie’s world-wise edgy best friend Ruby.

Directed by German filmmaker Christian Ditter (his first English speaking film) and adapted from the best selling novel ‘Where Rainbows End’ by Cecelia Ahern (who also wrote PS I Love You) and filmed in Ireland and Canada, this engaging British chick-lit movie will delight romantics everywhere : hopeless or otherwise.