eOpicle

There is something almost touching about the way Hollywood keeps rediscovering sex, as though it were an obscure European vegetable recently approved by the FDA. Every few years, the industry emerges from its climate-controlled laboratory, removes its safety goggles, and announces that people may—under carefully supervised circumstances—desire one another. Executives then congratulate themselves for their courage, actors begin saying “intimacy” in interviews as if they personally invented skin, and critics are asked to determine whether the resulting film is daring, regressive, liberating, exploitative, or merely populated by attractive people breathing too close together. This week, cinema has given us an unusually convenient experiment. Two movies arrive preoccupied with sex, repression, fantasy, shame, and the elaborate nonsense human beings construct around wanting each other. One is Will Gluck’s One Night Only , a dystopian romantic comedy in which unmarried Americans are legally ...