The Idea of You (2024)

The Idea of You is a bait-and-switch. Solene (Ann Hathaway) wonders, “What if I could just be the sort of person that goes camping by herself? What if all I need is [her daughter] Izz[y], and my artists, and my gallery, and my friends?” I wish the movie had been about this self-sufficient woman.  ...

After We Collided (2020)

After We Collided tries to emulate the success of popular romance novels, but the derivative storyline makes it difficult to become invested in the film. The forced romantic tension between the two leads feels contrived and unconvincing, and the lackluster execution, overreliant on clichés and tropes from other works, detracts from its overall impact and leaves...

Branching Out (2024)

Branching Out could have been a nice little family drama, but they ruined it by putting the plot on autopilot and letting it settle into your average predictable Hallmark romance.   Amelia (Sarah Drew) is a single mother by choice. Her nine-year-old daughter Ruby (Cora Bella) is assigned, as a school project, to make a...

A Match for the Prince (2023)

A Match for the Prince is yet another modern-day fairytale with a literal Prince (not so) Charming from a European monarchy (“an enclave by Switzerland”) with a patently made-up name, but who speaks the King’s English fluently (to be fair, Prince Maximillian Lucien Adalwolf of Voldario “went to boarding school in London”).  According to Max...

Recipe for Love (2014)

I'll give it to Recipe for Love; it briefly makes the idea of a cookbook ghostwriter sound not quite as dumb as it truly is. It helps to think of celebrity chef Dexter Durant (Shawn Roberts) as a self-taught musician who never learned to read or write music.  That's where Lauren Hennessey (Danielle Panabaker) comes...

Blind Date Book Club (2024)

Blind Date Book Club is about a girl from Nantucket, but being a Hallmark romcom, telegraphing the ending is the only thing it has in common with a dirty limerick. The leads end up together, and that’s not a spoiler — it’s a foregone conclusion.  I will give the filmmakers credit for not even pretending that the...

Float (2023)

Float is based on a Wattpad story, and it shows. Where else would you find a Chinese heroine named Waverly (Andrea Bang)? Okay, so Waverly has been living in Canada since she was three years old; going by Bang’s age, she would have been 18 when Wizards of Waverly Place premiered. It's a stretch, but maybe...

Fingernails (2023)

In the aptly titled Fingernails, couples can ‘scientifically’ determine whether they are in love by ‘testing’ their nails. A mere nail trimming won’t do, however; it has to be the entire nail, ripped right off the nail bed — and why not? It's no more arbitrary than any number of stupid things that people do...

Beautiful Disaster

The title Beautiful Disaster is technically correct. The heroine is drop-dead gorgeous, and the movie is a fucking mess — a scatterbrained mishmash of Rounders, Fight Club, and some sort of quasi-reverse 40 Days and 40 Nights, all in the guise of a gross-out sex comedy. Basically, the filmmakers’ approach was to throw shit at...