What to Watch on a Weekend When You Should Be Marching

I mean, it's way past time, isn't it? Hope to see you out there tomorrow on No Kings Day.

In theaters: "Materialists" (⭐ ⭐ ⭐) is I guess writer-director Celine Song's mainstream reward for making the nearly perfect "Past Lives" a few years back, and it's both entertaining and fascinating until it goes gooey in the home stretch. The movie's being wrongfully marketed as a romcom, but it certainly looks the part, with Dakota Johnson playing a chic Manhattan matchmaker who's torn between a smooth Wall Street tycoon (Pedro Pascal) and a penniless actor of an ex-boyfriend (Chris Evans). Johnson has never been more appealing, more confident or sexier – as with Greta Lee in "Past Lives," Song knows how to illuminate her heroines from within, giving them agency to match their doubts.

"Materialists" is best when it's frank – and it is, charmingly and disarmingly so – about love in a capitalist society, where feelings are less important than value in the marketplace of the heart and where money, to quote the sage Cyndi Lauper, changes everything. "It's math," Johnson's Lucy says simply, describing her success rate at matching the hims and hers of upper-stratosphere New York. In a traditional romcom, this would be setting the heroine up for a fall, cueing her capitulation to that old debbil True Love in the final act, but Song strings the game out for as long as she possibly can through the undeniable force field of charisma that Pascal and Johnson get going between them. Their scenes together are both hot and deliciously cool – jungle cats sizing each other up for the kill – and even though the movie keeps insisting they're not quite right for each other, they very much are.

To quote a post-screening text from Meredith Goldstein, my friend and author of the Boston Globe's "Love Letters" advice column and podcast, "I fully thought that the second Pedro reveals [spoiler], that was the first genuine conversation they had and they could’ve started from there. And maybe I’m just 47, but this is the hardest I’ve rooted against Chris Evans in my life." In fact, so successfully does "Materialists" make a case for the math sometimes leading to an exquisitely perfect match (but also sometimes a disaster, as in a subplot involving a client played by Zoë Winters) that the final act's ultimate caving into romcom logic comes as a distinct disappointment. I don't know what the first draft of Song's screenplay looked like – and whether the filmmaker felt the pressure to conform or someone higher up the food chain got their hands dirty – but I bet it was a nervier affair, and I'd liked to have seen it.

Classic of the Week: "Make Way for Tomorrow" (1937, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐, WatchTCM until June 17).