TONY Gatlif won the best director award at Cannes for his last film, 2004's Exiles. But watching this road-trip film set among the whirligig gypsy music of Romania, I was constantly interrupted by the blaring sound of my bullsh*t detector going off.

Transylvania is the kind of pretentious arthouse film that gives art movies a bad rep, and sets certain artistic types twittering about how 'meaningful' it is. At first glance, everything seems in place:

soulful, angry actress Asia Argento plays a bohemian in search of the Romany musician who made her pregnant. She finds him deep in Transylvania, only to be rejected. So she loses the plot; Tony Gatlif can't find it either. It becomes a road movie with shades of romance: she happens upon the odd charm of a travelling gold dealer, the wolverine Birol (Head-On) Unel.

A thin romance blossoms and she takes the life of a gypsy. They live out of his car. Argento rolls about in autumnal leaves; she freaks out in a parade; later a feather pillow emerges. Are we going to get a Jean Vigo moment of flying feathers on the side of a road? We do. But it's an empty gesture in a film of many melodramatic and superficial moments. It strives for a wispy poeticism, but the film has nothing to express but a half-baked primitivism. The gypsy music is barnstorming, however, and the fleeting seasons are captured with sensory beauty by cinematographer Celine Bozon.

Licence To Wed (Ken Wappis): John Krasinski, Mandy Moore, Robin Williams Running time: 91 mins .Gooey couple Sadie and Ben (Mandy Moore and John Krasinski) plan to get hitched, but Sadie insists on family tradition so it must be in their local church. Problem is their minister Reverend Frank (Robin Williams) won't do the nuptials until they pass his wedding course . . . a relationship wringer. It includes personality tests, total chastity and the bugging of their bedroom by the zealous pastor.

He even sits outside their apartment in a surveillance van.

It sounds like a licence to work up some pratfall hilarity, but comedies don't come blander than this inoffensive, inert mess.

Vanilla would be too sweet a word. The director, Ken Wappis, can't find it within himself to push the film for laughs. His leading players, John Krasinski and Mandy Moore, look far too nice to get really angry when we need them to. For once, Robin Williams, the man with the greatest talent in Hollywood for killing movies, keeps wisely to the wings.