Materialists (2025) review

Former actress Lucy (Dakota Johnson) works for a matchmaking company called Adore where she tries to find suitable partners for people (who have supposedly given up on dating apps such as Tinder and Bumble) and finds herself wooed by seemingly "perfect" businessman Harry (Pedro Pascal) while "keeping in touch" with her ex-boyfriend John (Chris Evans), a poor struggling actor and waiter, but her self-confidence is rattled once Sophie (Zoë Winters), one of her clients, is sexually assaulted on a date Lucy arranged.  It begins as this intriguing sociological examination of unrealistic expectations the sexes have when it comes to relationships - males in their late forties are after emaciated twenty-year-olds, women want extremely tall and wealthy mates - before settling into a standard "love triangle" story in which Lucy discovers Harry had "height surgery" and then suddenly realizes she isn't "totally smitten" with him (or his $12m apartment), and that her big talk about "marriage" being a "business transaction" is wrong.  As a writer-director, Song has shown (so far) a strong interest in stories for adults (which is a nice reprieve from the kiddie-fied movies out there) except she meanders a bit and hits some of her notes a little too hard (as if her grown-up crowd won't "get them").  And the moral seems to be that single ladies will "settle" for a broke dude ... just as long as he looks and acts like Chris Evans.