The Sex Of The Angels (El Sexo De Los Angeles) (2012)

The Sex Of the Angels (aka Angels of Sex) (or, my alternative title, How Difficult It Is To Set Up And Maintain A Threesome) is a very dry look at how Bruno, happily committed to his girlfriend Carla, encounters and starts having sex with Rai, a dancer, but despite the actors' obvious commitment to the film's positive polyamorous message and the attempt to keep things titillating with butt shots and sex scenes, this thruple never feels even slightly like it would go the distance, and the film is ultimately only as exciting as a well-intentioned public service announcement. 

★★☆☆☆

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The Idea of You (2024)

A romance ignites between a woman and a man, and standing in the way of their being in love forevermore are their considerable age gap (she is a 40-year-old single mother of a grown child and an art dealer; he is twenty-four) and his life in the spotlight as a boy-band idol, but both issues result in only two brief blips of conflict over the course of this breezy, thin rom-slight-com, padded out with not very rewarding Backstreet Boys-style song-and-dance routines.  

★★★☆☆

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Last Christmas (2019)

Kate, a Bridget Jones type - read, 'annoying' - portrayed by Emilia Clarke, makes a mess of everything - love, work, and relationships including the relationship she has with her boss (Michelle Yeoh in her now perpetual role as a cantankerous Asian Tiger mom), so it makes sense Kate falls for Henry Golding's character - he's a messily conceived part-Willy Wonka pixie-saviour, part-Mr Darcy romantic stalwart slogging-around-on-a-bicycle - who inspires Kate to fix up her messes before the movie reaches an unlikely Christmas magic fantasy ending - a bit like if Bridget Jones suddenly visited Santa's North Pole workshop - but it's an ending that somehow, through all the mess, manages to be touching.

★★☆☆☆

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Where The Crawdads Sing (2022)

In this D-grade To Kill A Mockingbird that takes Harper Lee's Southern Gothicism and replaces it with Hallmark schmaltz, a patently absurd Boo Radley archetype — a "Marsh Girl" ostracized by townsfolk despite being polite, independent, self-sufficient, strong, well-groomed, self-educated, and someone who easily attracts a spunky local boyfriend not once but twice, and who sets herself up as a mussel-monger and later as a book illustrator by communicating winningly with local shop owners and uppity city book publishers — is made a cause célèbre when she contrives a way to have her abusive boyfriend drop sixty-five feet from a firetower.

★☆☆☆☆

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The Blonde One (Un rubio) (2019)

Viewers may want to give up on this slow-moving drama as another and another and another scene opens on poor and rather gormless Gabo, an Argentinian man in an illicit sexual relationship with his roommate, doing another and another and another household chore while staring silently into space in a lovelorn way, but stick through Gabo's blank looks over the dishes and be rewarded, eventually, with a more compelling, tense relationship drama featuring powerful performances from the two leads and, in the end, less domestic labour and more grist.

★★★☆☆

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Doc Hollywood (1991)

The appeal of this comedy escaped me when I was in high school and all around me were lauding its praises, and now, having watched it again in 2023, I feel vindicated - again left cold, not amused by a city doctor's court-ordered stint in a rural backwater where he prattles with only personality-free hicks and embarks on a brittle romance. 

★★☆☆☆

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Spin Me Round (2022)

When a restaurant branch manager scores a weeklong business trip to Italy for a professional development course delivered by the international megastar owner of her restaurant chain, she imagines that Tuscan sunsets, a rustic Italian villa, and romance are in store, but those expectations are immediately let down when dullard Craig picks her and a bunch of other hopefuls up from the airport, in this dry comedy that hilariously blends Office Space-style corporate dreariness with Masterchef-style foodie-ism and Griswold's-style Americans-in-Europe dagginess.  

★★★★☆

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Larry Crowne (2011)

Had the title been Late to Class, this movie would clearly have been a romantic comedy about a newly-unemployed boomer who heads back to school in order to give his life new direction, but with the austere title Larry Crowne and a screenplay written by director Tom Hanks that keeps the romantic leads at a remove, held apart by educator-student propriety, the movie, drily funny, not hilarious, remains an oddity, not a Sleepless In Seattle or You've Got Mail romcom great.

★★★☆☆

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New Year's Eve (2011)

On a New Year's Eve, the Times Square Ball gets stuck, neither up nor down, and this same inert state befalls a veritable Love, Actually ensemble of New Yorkers whose lives grind to a stop in deeply uninteresting, go-nowhere situations like the nurse (Halle Berry) who tends bedside to a dying man in hospital (Robert De Niro) - that's everything - or the man in pyjamas (Ashton Kutcher) who gets stuck in an elevator with a singer (that woman from Glee) - the end - or the pregnant couple who are, well, pregnant - and still pregnant each time the movie unnecessarily returns to them - or, in the most peculiar of the go-nowhere vignettes, a delivery guy (Zac Efron) escorts a woman (Michelle Pfeiffer) around NYC on a scooter skimping on her bucket list that she has no reason to rush through before midnight when, spoiler alert, the Times Square Ball drops and this dull romcom ends and life starts moving again.

★★☆☆☆

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A Ghost Story (2017)

All we see of their relationship is that he shares a pair of headphones with her once and, in bed, adopts a sleeping position that suggests love - not facing away from each other on opposite sides of the bed - so it hardly seems warranted that when he dies in a car crash he returns as a bedsheeted ghost and experiences, in a dreamy, dialogue-free extended indie videoclip, a mawkish Tree of Life history of the land upon which his and his partner's house stands; he watches tenants and buildings come and go over time until it starts to seem like we are watching his love affair with real estate, not with the woman played by Rooney Mara, whose relationship with Casey Affleck's ghost ends up feeling like a mere blip.

★★☆☆☆

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A Rainy Day in New York (2019)

In Woody Allen's inconsequential, breezy romantic comedy - which I quite enjoyed - Timothée Chalamet's gloomy Gatsby Welles shuffles hunch-shouldered, arms in pockets around a rainy New York City, spending a day with sunny partner Ashleigh that doesn't go to plan, and just as you think it yourself about his slight and self-aware performance, Allen has Chalamet say - ostensibly about another character but far too applicable to his own performance to be coincidence - "[He's] a James Dean minus the acting chops".

★★★☆☆

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The Man With The Answers (2021)

This unhurried, tender and utterly charming comedy has former diving champion Victor, a Greek, driving an old Audi from Greece to Germany, and on the ferry to Italy, he meets Mathias, a German whose Rupert Everett drollness so disarms Victor he eventually, after initial resistance, lets his guard down, braves the dangers of being chopped up into pieces on Italy's provincial backroads and welcomes Mathias as a companion on his journey to reinvigorate himself, a trip full of highs and lows, ups and downs, and beautiful scenery.

★★★★☆

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2:22 (2017)

Most of the energy put into this Australian film, a sci-fi romantic thriller about a man experiencing odd things at 2:22pm each day, is spent trying to make Melbourne and Sydney look like New York City (or at least trying to make them look not unlike New York City, with the camera sticking close to the actors and street scenes cutting short just before a tram rumbles past), and there's not much energy to be found anywhere else because the tone is supposed to be ethereal, mystical, and mesmeric, and the two leads - playing the world's worst air traffic controller, and a victim of the near-aviation incident he causes - are brought together by Fate with their destinies written in the stars, so they are essentially automatons going through the motions whether they understand why they keep ending up at Grand Central Station or not.

★★☆☆☆

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The Door Into Summer (夏への扉 キミのいる未来へ) (2021)

Robert A Heinlein's 1956 science fiction novel is turned here into an unhurried Japanese 'heartful' drama mixed with madcapped and madly paced science fiction of a distinctly "Back To The Future" kind (replete with a mad professor in a white coat screaming about there being no time to lose to a bewildered kid in a orange/red puffer jacket) but the two elements - sloooow heartful drama and zany science fiction -  do not sit well together, plus the sight of the pretty-J-boy hero turning to booze, swigging from a flask, or the cat-hating J-femme fatale "letting go" and becoming a hideous Jabba the Hut draws unintended laughs, detracting from the scifi adventure.

★★☆☆☆

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Masquerade (1988)

The plot is the stuff of old-school gothic romantic thrillers of the Daphne Du Maurier kind with an heiress to an immense fortune (Meg Tilly) not realising how much danger she is in as she falls in love with a gigolo (Rob Lowe) but fails to notice the childhood friend-turned-policeman who vies for her heart, but the acting is often terrible and the characters paper-thin, giving this romantic thriller a perfunctoriness that no amount of sweaty Body Heat-style sex, nor Rob Lowe's glistening torso, and not even a fleeting partial glimpse of Lowe's manhood can make up for. 

★★★☆☆

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Book Club (2018)

Older females, book club members reading the Fifty Shades soft porn chick-lit series, are inspired by Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele's exploits to take on the challenges of modern romance, embarking upon online dating, initiating sex again with long-since-celibate partners, rekindling past romances and daring to love again after grief, and it is pretty funny in a very minor way - my 79-year-old mum particularly found it a fun watch.

★★☆☆☆

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It's Complicated (2009)

Some of Nancy Meyer's movies are so clean, so sanitised, with sets so "interior-designed" they feel like laundry detergeant commercials, but she keeps things more down-to-earth and more relatable in this romantic comedy, another movie in which she squarely targets a more mature generation of female movie-goer, this time telling the story about a woman (Meryl Streep) who embarks upon an affair with her married ex-husband (Alec Baldwin) while keeping up appearances with her adult children and with the architect (Steve Martin) renovating her house.

★★★★☆

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Out Of Africa (1985)

Based on Karen Blixen's 1937 memoir of her time spent in British East Africa, Sydney Pollack's unhurried romance stars Meryl Streep, her porcelain skin, Robert Redford, and his blue eyes, and tells a sweeping, poetic, heartbreaking love story - no, not between Streep's Blixen and Redford's Denys but between Blixen and the object of her profoundest love: verdant, spectacular Kenya.

★★★★★

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Rebecca (1940)

*Spoiler warning*

Hitchcock's adapatation of Daphne du Maurier's romantic thriller, about the second Mrs de Winter struggling to live up to the image of the first glamorous socialite one, provides neat last minute outs for an abuser and body tamperer and literally concludes, "She was asking for it," but is thoroughly enjoyable and full of memorable moments, like the dreamy approach to Manderley, the amusing courtship that happens behind the back of  Edythe van Hopper, and that fiery ending.

★★★★★

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Travellers and Magicians (Chang Hup The Gi Tril Nung) (2003)

A mountain villager in Bhutan embarks upon a trip to New York where a friend assures him he can pick apples and earn in half a day what he is earning a month as a government official, but on his way, he meets a rice paper maker and his daughter, an apple seller, a drunk, and a jovial monk, and it is the monk who tells him an epic story within a story - a mythological Bhutanese The Postman Always Rings Twice - that eventually has the man reconsidering the beautiful impermanence of things, like his trip, like his notion of a dreamland, and like this wonderful refreshing breeze of a drama you'll wish never had to end.

★★★★★

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