As with the horror genre, there are only two 2006 romances that are Fresh, with a third threatening to go Fresh as well. Even genre veteran Sandra Bullock's The Lake House was too poorly reviewed to be in contention. So, what are the top romances this year and the contenders for the Golden Tomato? We have a story about the elderly finding love; Kate Winslet hooking up with Jack Black over the holiday; a man's imagination running wild in Michel Gondry's latest; Sanaa Lathan and Simon Baker in something new; and Colin Farrell and Salma Hayek in the adaptation of John Fante's novel, Ask the Dusk. Which one will get the honor of being the best-reviewed love story of 2006?

While not Jungle Fever or even Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?, Something New stars Sanaa Lathan and Simon Baker in a story about an interracial romance between a successful but highly-strung lawyer and a laidback landscape designer. And though it doesn't rank as one of the classic romances, Something New is "sporadically amusing (Reelviews' James Berardinelli) and "delivers on its title's premise (Mark Holcomb of the Village Voice).

It's never too late to find love, as the people in The Boynton Beach Club discover. Too bad the movie plays like a sitcom. Michael Booth of the Denver Post calls it not "a very good movie, but it somehow manages to be enjoyable," but John Hartl of the Seattle Times counters that it's "unsatisfying."

You won't find much holiday cheer in The Holiday, a rom-com that's too predictable for its own good. Newsday's Jan Stuart says the problem is that "[t]he actors, pros one and all, operate in some weird, bubbly dimension that is someone's notion of how people behave in romantic comedies."

With Colin Farrell and Salma Hayek involved, there has to be some heat in Ask the Dust, right? Not according to Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman and the countless fellow critics who agree with him when he says the movie is "lifeless kitsch."

From this unimpressive bunch, the best-reviewed Romance movie for 2006, with an adjusted score of 64.66 and a Tomatometer of 69 percent, is ... The Science of Sleep.

One can't expect a straightforward movie from the director of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. In The Science of Sleep, Gael Barcia Bernal stars as a man who works in a company that makes calendars and has the hots for one of his neighbors. To escape his daily drudgery, he lets his imagination get the best of him. While the narrative can be charitably called messy, it gives the movie a whimsical and surreal aura. J. Hoberman of the Village Voice says the movie is "a wondrous concoction."