Chronically Streaming

Friends, I feel like I wandered alone in the rom-com wilderness for many days before stumbling across 40 Dates and 40 Nights (2026), which was a like balm upon my poor arid eyeballs and sated my gnawing need for wit and humor and romantic chemistry and a woman getting ahead without the usual patriarchal backhand. …

Hang on. Let me just step into my hip waders before I brave these egregiously maudlin and gratuitously schmaltzy waters. Watch out! Very verbose swells to your left! Eddies of overly-wrought emotions on your right! Phew. I mean, you should go into any season of Sweet Magnolias (2020) braced for suspect Southern accents, tortured prose, …

Imagine a cake frosted with small amounts of several different kinds of icing and you’ll have a general feel for This Time Next Year (2024)—well-meaning and sweet, but patchy and uneven. But that doesn’t mean you should toss the whole thing in the garbage. Yes, there are definitely too many plot points happening with very …

I went into watching Voicemails For Isabelle (2026) with a fair amount of trepidation. I mean, a romance movie that’s nearly two hours long, includes that old chestnut of “calling a dead person’s phone without realizing their number has been re-assigned,” and uses chronic or terminal illness as a lead-in to a meet-cute? The flags …