Romantic Comedy

The Drama review: To Have and to Scold

Jeremy BeckReviews
Robert Pattinson and Zendaya in The Drama

It’s a classic meet-cute. He spies her in a coffee shop reading a book. He has to talk to her, so he quickly googles the novel and approaches her with some canned, cheesy material about how much it spoke to him. He keeps stumbling over his words, panicking when she refuses to engage, only for her to startle and remove an unseen AirPod from her left ear. “I’m deaf in this one,” she explains, and he starts to melt, realizing she didn’t hear a damn thing he said, but then she throws him an unexpected lifeline: “Do you want to start again?”

This is the delightful opening scene of The Drama, a bewitching and provocative movie that initially unfolds as a storybook romantic comedy. Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie (Robert Pattinson) are the perfect couple: smart, attractive, blessed with verbal and physical chemistry. Their courtship checks all of the boxes, in particular a magical first kiss that would be the envy of Jane Austen. It’s now the week of their wedding, and we learn the details of their fairy-tale engagement as Charlie runs a draft of his speech past his best man, Mike (Mamoudou Athie), who’s so moved he starts crying. Everything is so light and sweet and charming, you wonder if Kristoffer Borgli, the film’s writer and director, somehow got the title wrong. He didn’t. Read More

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Splitsville, Twinless, and the Offbeat Romantic Comedy

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Dakota Johnson in Splitsville; Dylan O'Brien and James Sweeney in Twinless

It’s been a rough two decades for the romantic comedy. Twenty years ago, the summer box office was already showing signs of intellectual-property creep, but nestled amid the Star Wars prequel and the Batman origin story and the Steven Spielberg and Tim Burton remakes were two smash-hit original rom-coms: Wedding Crashers and The 40-Year-Old Virgin. (You could also throw in Mr. and Mrs. Smith, depending on your level of genre pedantry.) In 2025, you need to scroll all the way down to #18 before finding a single romantic comedy, Materialists (and calling that one a rom-com is a bit of a stretch); at a modest $37M, it’s the only rom-com of the year to scrape its way past $3M domestic.

Were studios just waiting to unleash their laugh riots until after Labor Day? Whatever the reason, last weekend saw the release of two new comedies that, while not strictly adhering to rom-com conventions, nevertheless serve as a welcome change of pace for anyone exhausted by all of the comic-book adaptations and animated sequels. Neither exactly set the box office afire, which is a shame, given that one of the pleasures of a well-made romantic comedy is the joy of experiencing collective laughter and heartbreak with fellow patrons. That, and both of these happen to be pretty good. Read More

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Fly Me to the Moon: Give Me a Fake

Jeremy BeckReviews
Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum in Fly Me to the Moon

Remember movie stars? Those fabulously attractive celebrities who compelled audiences to flock to theaters in droves by sheer virtue of their names appearing on the marquee? They’re back in Fly Me to the Moon, a fizzy, fitful romantic comedy stocked with bright colors, lithe bodies, and a smattering of funny lines. It’s set in the ’60s and could have been made then too, even if its throwback vibes are often as clumsy as they are charming.

In the spirit of plucky wholesomeness that the movie tries to evoke, let’s start with the good stuff: Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum. And also Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum’s clothes. The costume designer, Mary Zophres (a regular collaborator with both Damien Chazelle and the Coen Brothers), develops the film’s characters with greater efficiency and style than Rose Gilroy’s clunky screenplay. Tatum, with his bull neck and broad shoulders, is outfitted in an array of tight-fitting sweaters that convey the swelling frustration of a robust leader whose vision is thwarted by external forces. Johansson, in contrast, is the picture of crisply tailored elegance, gliding through the picture in pastel dresses that accentuate her authority as well as her curves. Read More

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Hit Man: Murder for Liar

Jeremy BeckReviews
Adria Arjona and Glen Powell in Hit Man

Last year, Netflix released David Fincher’s The Killer, a fit between director and subject matter that was so hand-in-glove perfect, it practically felt like a self-portrait. Now the streaming giant is “distributing” (to your TV set, if not to your local theater) Richard Linklater’s Hit Man—a less obvious match. Linklater’s career is sufficiently long (his first feature came in 1990) that he can’t be pigeonholed into a single genre, but his best-known works—Dazed and Confused, the Before trilogy, Boyhood—are talky, leisurely dramedies that contemplate the passage of time with relaxed, unforced intimacy. He’s an ambler, not a sprinter. This is the guy to make a movie about an undercover faux assassin?

Turns out, the pairing—like Linklater’s cozy, fluid dialogue—is natural and smooth. That’s partly because Gary Johnson, the New Orleans philosophy professor whose real-life exploits entrapping solicitors of murder were previously chronicled by Skip Hollandsworth in a Texas Monthly article, is less a killer than a bullshitter; he outfoxes his quarry rather than overpowering them. But it’s also because Linklater has wielded his gift for capturing the idiosyncrasies of human connection—the freewheeling conversations, the swirling emotions, the physical attraction—and retrofitted it into a crime-adjacent thriller that’s more concerned with pleasure than violence. The result is a movie that’s consistently enjoyable and even a little suspenseful. Read More

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The Fall Guy: Putting the Action Stunt and Center

Jeremy BeckReviews
Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt in The Fall Guy

My screening of The Fall Guy was preceded by one of those awkward “Thanks for coming to the theater!” inserts, in which its star (Ryan Gosling) and director (David Leitch) informed the audience that the picture we were about to watch was conceived as a valentine to the stunt community. This, like pretty much everything else in the movie, was an example of overkill, given that its opening scene is a quick-hitting montage of classic stunts (including, if my eyes can be trusted, a glimpse of Leitch’s own Atomic Blonde) while Colt Seavers (Gosling) narrates about stunt performers’ invisible, invaluable contributions to the motion-picture industry. You half-expect the film to pause after each elaborate action sequence so that the doubles can be identified by name and thanked for their service.

So, not subtle. But to a certain sect of nerdy cinephiles (who me?), the themes advanced by The Fall Guy are significant and noble. Much like the most recent Mission: Impossible entry, it mounts an impassioned and convincing argument in favor of tangible, handwoven artistry. The cockamamie plot may manufacture a number of human villains, but the most pernicious force on display here is the blue screen that looms in the background of the film-within-the-film climax. For all its winking modernism, this is essentially a classic movie about good and evil—one where the heroes insist on shooting everything with practical effects while the bad guys proclaim, “We can just fix it in post.” Read More

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