Romantic comedy Driving Aphrodite marks the long awaited return of Nia Vardalos to the big screen, seven years after her self-penned, Oscar-nominated smash My Big Fat Greek Wedding. In the interim, she wrote and starred in the ill-fated, spin-off television series My Big Fat Greek Life and the hit-and-miss drag queen comedy Connie and Carla, co-starring Toni Collette.

Driving Aphrodite returns Vardalos to her beloved Greece in the guise of an unhappily single tour guide, who is oblivious to Mr Right sitting at the front of her malfunctioning bus.

For the first time, she doesn’t speak her own words, relying on a screenplay by Mike Reiss, whose credits on The Simpsons and The Garry Shandling Show should guarantee big laughs. For the first half-hour, you’ll be hard-pressed to muster a smile as the film hastily introduces the holidaymakers, whose journeys of self-discovery run parallel to Vardalos’s heroine.

Reiss makes the resolutions to these stories abundantly clear, practically handing out tissues in the first ten minutes so we’re prepared for the death of one character, who evidently flew on Grim Reaper Airways.

Greek-American tour guide Georgia (Vardalos) has grown weary of the lack of respect shown by tourists to her beautiful country. So she hands in her notice and grits her teeth for her final tour with driver Poupi Kakas (Alexix Georgoulis), who somehow manages to keep the vehicle on the road when he isn’t making eyes at Georgia.

Sure enough, the latest group of passengers have no interest in the past and only seem to perk up when souvenirs or food are involved.

Brash American traveller Irv (Richard Dreyfuss) gives the tour guide some advice about how to spice up their trip. “History has got a lot of dirty stories. Sex sells,” he tells her. Once Georgia starts to stray from her dry, fact-heavy spiel, her passengers begin to pay attention and they all start bonding, even a British couple (Caroline Goodall, Ian Ogilvy) and their teenage daughter Caitlin (Sophie Stuckey), who just wants one day on a beach.

Driving Aphrodite trots out cringe-worthy gags that would be rejected from a second-rate TV sitcom. Vardalos injects life into the film’s jauntier second half but half of the audience will have given up by then.

The truth about Ricky Gervais’ new comedy The Invention of Lying, co-written and co-directed by Matthew Robinson, is that it is mean-spirited, misconceived and starved of big laughs. Set in an alternate reality in which everyone instinctively tells the truth and the concept of a fib doesn’t yet exist, the film is ripe with comic potential.

%movie(37249) Sadly, Gervais and Robinson take their central dramatic conceit to garish extremes, having characters converse with brutal honesty, regardless of the hurt they might cause. A sadistic streak runs throughout the screenplay, sporadically vanishing for a handful of touching and poignant scenes like a son tearfully bidding farewell to his dying mother and convincing her about the existence of Heaven. Predictably, Gervais casts himself in the lead role and as with Ghost Town, he’s an unsympathetic and unconvincing romantic lead.

The notion that Jennifer Garner’s acid-tongued beauty might succumb to his so-called charms is more laughable than anything in the script.