#rom-com

#rom-com

Love Story was based on Elizabeth Beller's book Once Upon a Time, which was helpful, but in a lot of ways Black Rabbit was more 'real' than Love Story because it was entirely fictional. I come from a research background so there's always a lot of research involved, whether it's photographs or books.

A recent tragedy-exploiting television series about John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette features a character using my name and presents her as me. The choice to portray her as irritating, self-absorbed, whiny and inappropriate was no accident. But a real, living person is not a narrative device. Isn't it textbook misogyny to tear down one woman in order to build up another?

Every time I go a couple years without a home base here, I feel a little off-center. Though she's based in Los Angeles, she's almost always had a place somewhere in Manhattan - Gramercy, King Street, a grimy Chelsea loft with ex-husband Chris Robinson (a real-estate memory that delights her when I bring it up midway through our lunch).

I have never used cocaine in my life or hosted cocaine-fueled parties. I have never pressured anyone into marriage. I have never desecrated any family heirloom or intruded upon anyone's private memorial. I have never planted any story in the press. I never compared Jacqueline Onassis' death to a dog's.

The centerpiece is Empire for Two, a date night that gives one lucky couple private access to the building's interactive exhibits and Observation Decks. The experience culminates in an intimate dinner for two on the 102nd Floor, complete with a specially decorated setting, a professional musician, vintage Dom Pérignon and a three-course chef's tasting menu by STATE Grill and Bar, paired with wines selected by the building's sommelier.

A good recommendation I recently received: My friend put the 1988 film Crossing Delancey on an end-of-year recommendation list, and it turned out to be the perfect nightcap for a dreary winter's day: a wry romantic comedy of errors that doubles as an ode to Manhattan's Lower East Side. Its love interest is a pickle salesman-utterly charming!

When people bemoan the state of the 21st Century rom-com, they usually haven't seen this gem starring Jack Quaid and Maya Erskine as college buddies who decide to be each other's dates for multiple weddings over the course of one summer. Sure, the ending is basically predetermined, but the execution is pure joy, with a snappy script and lead performances that make you wish these two actors had made five more movies like this.

"Gosh, I just remember when my agent called me about Notting Hill, and I thought, 'Well, that sounds like the dumbest idea of any movie I could ever do,'"

It's the sort of small, character-driven American indie that has served as the festival's lifeblood for almost 50 years and, as the system has expanded in some ways and shrunk in others, the sort that has often struggled to make it far out of Park City. Back in 2023, a quiet, disarming and perfectly Sundance film called A Little Prayer premiered yet didn't get released until late last summer and was seen by a precious few.

Movies like Die My Love, starring Jennifer Lawrence, show an almost logical unravelling of a mum facing modern pressures

In People We Meet on Vacation, we follow travel writer Poppy Wright and Alex Nilsen as they navigate their friends-to-lovers trajectory over the years. The plot homes in on their annual week's summer holiday throughout their friendship, revealing their history to the viewer through a series of flashbacks that take place across the world, with scenes set everywhere from Ohio to Tuscany. But where, exactly, did Netflix film the adaptation?

At age 12 I finally watched the film and it felt like it was made for me. I recognised and appreciated, unlike its critics, the hodgepodge. It is not so much a chick flick with magic as a genre chimera: romance, gothic melodrama, small-town satire, ghost story and feminist parable. I grew up in Hong Kong during the 1990s, a city defined by its complex history with traditions shaped by diverse communities and displaced refugees like my Beijing-born father.