Diego Semerene

The film shamelessly announces from the very start that it’s an attempt at atonement for disgraced designer John Galliano.

While it lends itself to some interesting insight on the politics of non-exclusive, fuck-buddy dynamics, its characters are ultimately too one-dimensional and their dialogue too theatrical to sustain an involving cinematic experience.

The very few instances where stereotypes are challenged are forced and didactically delivered.

It's more interested in borrowing terminal cancer as a narrative shorthand for intensity than investigating it as a lived experience.

Justin Kelly's film is more interested in rushing through the narrative's events than contemplating their environment.

The film has, at its source, a pool of affectations that so often constitute, or plague, American indie films--and, perhaps, American culture more generally.

The ingenuity of writer-director Jeremy LaLonde's film ends with its title.

The hygienization of Rio into what at times looks like a soulless Southern California town is so scandalous it feels like a spoof of the Cities of Love series.