On paper, Lena Dunham and Megan Stalter seem like an ideal creative match for their new Netflix comedy Too Much. Dunham is the co-creator and star of Girls, the acclaimed (if polarizing) HBO comedy about Hannah, a young woman with a knack for making situations uncomfortable in a hurry. Stalter, …
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This year, for the first time in a while, a movie gave me the boost of serotonin that only hits my brain when I’m watching a great rom-com. It happened near the end of the Netflix film Hit Man, directed by Richard Linklater and starring Glen Powell and Adria Arjona. …
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To his 700,000 TikTok followers and thousands of online fans, Caleb Hearon is a stand-up comedian, podcaster, actor, and screenwriter known for his absurdist take on zillennial comedy. Take, for instance, one of his most famous viral clips: When an anonymous troll commenter wrote that Hearon looks like “he broke …
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Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A rabbi and a podcaster walk into a party, and Netflix makes a show out of it. Well, sort of. In the new romantic comedy Nobody Wants This, Adam Brody plays the rabbi, Noah, fresh out of a long-term relationship with the …
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Adria Arjona says she was destined for pop stardom. She dreamed of becoming the next Beyoncé or Britney Spears as she crisscrossed the Americas with her father, the Guatemalan singer Ricardo Arjona, watching him serenade audiences with Latin pop ballads. Her home became a hotel room. She jetted between tour …
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Middle-aged women don’t have a lot of fun in movies. If we are depicted onscreen, we are often shown as harried, hypercompetent mothers and wives. We are tragically divorcing or exhaustedly raising our children. Sometimes we do some (alleged) murder. Other times we walk into the sea. But the horny, …
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Stuart McDonald deeply admires Netflix’s first interactive movie Black Mirror: Bandersnatch. He describes the film as a dark journey wherein a viewer’s decisions in a gamer nerd’s life could lead to acid trips, existential torment, suicide, stuffed bunnies, and decapitated heads. But McDonald knows audiences will have a different reaction …
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The first time Celine Dion shows up as herself in the mostly predictable romcom Love Again, she’s handing down icy answers to a room full of reporters asking inane questions about her upcoming concert tour. But our leading man, Rob (Sam Heughan), music critic for the fictional New York Chronicle, …
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It’s been a dreadful year — OK, few years — for romcoms. This year gave us Shotgun Wedding, a J.Lo-starring smorgasbord about a destination wedding overrun by pirates; You People, Kenya Barris’ tone-deaf interracial-dating romcom whose big kiss was faked by CGI; and Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher’s Your Place …
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Raine Allen-Miller’s feature directorial debut Rye Lane, out now on Hulu, is a firecracker of a film exploring modern-day dating (and heartbreak) mores while providing witty commentary on the borderline-absurd ways in which millennials and zoomers have latched onto social media buzzword culture. Running a brisk one hour and 22 …
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