This is the film that happens after an unlikely pair Meets Cute, after the guy gets girl, after he intercepts her at the airport to go ahead and stay. Set in a gorgeously shot Athens, Greece, as a boozy sun-drenched party paradise, Argyris Papadimitropoulos’ kinetic drama Monday (C+) propels its appealing thirtysomething American expat leads into immediate lust and leaves most of the film for figuring out if they’re even remotely right for each other. Sebastian Stan is magnetic, spry and beguiling as the devil-may-care deejay and vagabond; and Denise Gough is the complete opposite as a plucky but more proper immigration lawyer who is in one of those rebound travel-the-world on a bender type situations. In chronicling this mismatched duo’s fall from an almost too metaphorical Garden of Eden (it’s a fig leaf-free beach in this case), the film plumbs the notion of how a relationship can survive on chemistry and chemicals alone and finds lots of erotic ways to determine if true love can really be skin deep. But the episodes of showing how different the wavelengths each is surfing can be painful and awkward, and the movie’s near-improvised vibe feels a touch incomplete. The filmmakers get points for examining the intoxication of obsessive love but rarely make space, momentum or structure to adequately fill in some of the emotional gaps which would elucidate why these giddy drifters choose to spend time together on any activity other than sex. Because it is set in the exotic milieu of a foreign land with characters somewhat in a toxic fog of trying to find each other, the story becomes more absorbing even as its trajectory appears clear to the audience. Fittingly, it’s all lovely to look at and drink in, but the hangover comprises most of this bittersweet story.

This film has all the narrative subtlety of a string of Reddit forum comments or one of those propaganda film strips from health class narrated by the gym coach. A message movie has to at least be competently made before a viewer can determine if its ideology rings true, but Nick Loeb and Cathy Allyn‘s Roe v. Wade (F) is so glaringly misbegotten as a motion picture that its multitude of flaws eclipse its POV. The lead characters, played by Loeb and Jamie Kennedy, are doctors who perform abortions with reckless abandon and little regard for the ethics of their medical procedures, and yet somehow they are intended to be the vessels of a breakthrough conversion that what they are doing is not (capital R?) right. The tone is all over the map, and any attempt at irony to make its points is largely lost in a muddled storyline. Predominantly filmed in the color orange to imply the 1970s, the film punctuates its loosely interspersed doses of conspiracy theories and heavy-handed (capital M?) messages with a fictional recreation of aspects of the titular landmark Supreme Court trial itself. None of the proceedings achieves the gravitas its filmmakers are hoping to attain. No actor in the ensemble, not Jon Voight nor Stacey Dash, is done any favors by this meandering script. It’s telling when Joey Lawrence may give the film’s best performance as a conservative law professor, certainly “whoa” casting in anyone’s universe. Freeze frames and jaw-dropping narration, songs that would seem routine in a Borat movie if not meant to literally shock, turgid line readings, music that makes Reefer Madness look understated and a systematic sequence of bewildering choices comprise a film that doesn’t meet the minimum bar. No doubt the creators of this film intended to expose the hypocrisy of those who oppose their view, and most certainly they will decry a liberal coterie lauding films like Never Rarely Sometimes Always and not giving this movie a separate but equal applause. But this film doesn’t do a great service to its agenda and certainly fails as cinema.