Reviews Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary? Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting

Getting Hooked on Quitting

Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary?

Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous

Is College Necessary?

Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear

Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters

‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Reviews Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary? Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting

Getting Hooked on Quitting

Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary?

Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous

Is College Necessary?

Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear

Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters

‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

“One Night Only” and the summer of rom-com sex talk

Three new films find room for intimacy in a slide toward fascism

Published August 15, 2026 12:00PM (EDT)

In the dog days of summer, there’s no better place to escape the heat than inside the air-conditioned paradise of a movie theater. Perhaps you’ll even find yourself there with a romantic companion, their uncovered leg grazing against yours as you both tuck your feet in to make room for the annoying person who came in late and is now trying to find their seat in the dark. Your skin touches theirs, trading the dewy moisture of perspiration. How electric; erotic, even. For just a second, the spark between you two is so powerful that it melts away every care outside of that place and time. 

And then, your film — a romantic comedy or dramedy that seems like the perfect date movie — begins, and you’re quickly reminded that no amount of desire can remove you from the context of the world you exist in. The fantasy comes crashing down. Even the fluffy rom-coms are steeped in real life’s anxieties about the social and political, the wars and the wages. But the passion was there; it was real. Maybe the moment was even more charged by the knowledge, somewhere in the back of your head, that these unexpected, carnal joys arrive far less often when so much of our time is spent just trying to make it from one day to the next. Sex, even........

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