Film Review — Materialists. What happens when a rom-com finally…

People keep saying that everywhere we turn, we see a Pedro Pascal movie. So what? There was a time when everywhere we turned we were seeing Zendaya, Andrew Garfield, or Timothée Chalamet. Now it’s Pedro Pascal. Honestly, you should be grateful. I certainly am… Maybe we should just declare this the Year of Pedro Pascal. But in this film, what impressed me even more than Pedro Pascal himself was Chris Evans. It’s been a painfully long time since we’ve seen Chris Evans in a genuinely good film, hasn’t it?

Ever since Knives Out (2019), he has been consistently starring in truly awful projects. Granted, he wasn’t exactly known for choosing great films before that either, but I still had this quiet hope that Knives Out would be a turning point for him. Instead, he went on to have a bafflingly terrible few years, career-wise. Seeing him in a genuinely good movie again — and actually delivering a strong performance — feels almost relieving. Honestly, this film should have been the event of the year. Bringing together a cast this good, and doing it for a film that actually deserves them, is genuinely admirable.

Materialist takes the romantic-comedy formulas of the 2000s and early 2010s and seems to flip them on their head. How do I put this? You can easily imagine this…