New Year’s Eve

Director Garry Marshall continues his systematic defilement of the calendar’s most romantic holidays with another romcom built and executed like a ’70s disaster movie. Repeating the formula from last year’s ‘Valentine’s Day’, Marshall assembles an all-star cast including (deep breath) Hilary Swank, Michelle Pfeiffer, Zac Efron, Sarah Jessica Parker, Seth Meyers, Sofia Vergara, Jessica Biel, Lea Michele from ‘Glee’ and many, many more for a labyrinth of intersecting melodramas and love stories set in New York City on, naturally, December 31. The hypothetical advantage of such a massive ensemble is the assumption that, somewhere among the high quantity of characters, there’ll be a few folks we actually like. Yet each plot thread is worse than the last: a welcome break from Katherine Heigl and Jon Bon Jovi’s interminable lovers’ quarrel simply means another trip to the hospital to watch Halle Berry console a cancer-ridden Robert de Niro. It all adds up to a celebrity-obsessed city symphony played on one painfully flat note.