What to Expect When You're Expecting, review 12 cert, 100 min: dir Kirk Jones starring Cameron Diaz, Jennifer Lopez, Dennis Quaid The joys of pregnancy in What to Expect When You're Expecting are first announced by morning sickness on live TV, when Cameron Diaz's Strictly-style dance contestant abruptly empties her stomach into a glass bowl. It's strange that this all-star comedy-drama was derived, however arcanely, from a bestselling self-help book, since it's hard to imagine the advice on offer benefiting anyone outside a pram-stroll radius of Beverly Hills. While Diaz's whining diva is lured into a hastier-than-planned commitment to her dance partner (Matthew Morrison), Jennifer Lopez's freelance photographer, who can't conceive, firms up her own adoption plans: pop to Ethiopia and bag one of the adorable black ones. Angelina Jolie and Madonna don't show up, so I could only fantasise about their far-more-fun three-way tussle in No You Didn't, Girlfriend: Sub-Saharan Baby Heist. Elsewhere, we have a rogue miscarriage, and Elizabeth Banks trying her best with the silliest strand of all, as the manager of a darling little boutique who's just published a children's book extolling the virtues of breast-feeding. To children. Her late-in-the-movie breakdown, after realising that carrying a foetus to term is actually quite hard work, becomes an "unlikely" (read: wholly implausible) YouTube sensation and has other grateful mums besieging her shop, in the most patronising sequence from an impressively fertile field. For a film so keen to wallow in the gross-out possibilities of merely possessing a vagina, the depiction of labour here is exactly the same sanitised business as usual, and for a movie with delusions of its own constant hilarity, it's almost surreally free of laughs. On the whole, I'd rather give birth.