Galitzine, Nicholas (1994- )

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    Is ‘The Idea of You’ Harry Styles Fan Fiction?

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    The filmmakers do more to align star and character than the novel did. But somehow that doesn’t make the movie indebted to the musician.Hayes Campbell, the dreamy protagonist of the new rom-com “The Idea of You,” has a bit in common with the mega pop star Harry Styles:In the movie, Hayes, played by Nicholas Galitzine, is a member of August Moon, a boy band with tons of very ardent teen and tween girl fans. Styles was a member of a boy band called One Direction. You’ve probably heard of it.Hayes is British. So is Harry Styles.Hayes eventually quits his band and starts making soulful pop rock. So did Harry.Hayes likes to date older women, and his relationship with a gallerist named Solène Marchand (Anne Hathaway) is the backbone of the film. Harry, too, has been involved in tabloid-documented relationships with older women, most famously, the actress and director Olivia Wilde.So does “The Idea of You” come off as an act of fan fiction? Bizarrely, no, even if the shadow of Styles does loom large over the whole project.Plenty of headlines have already described the movie as “Harry Styles fan fiction,” though Robinne Lee, the author of the 2017 novel on which it is based, is typically coy in interviews about whether the pop star inspired her book.August Moon, the band in the film, above, resembles One Direction more than the band in the original novel does.Amazon Studios“Inspired is a strong word,” Lee has said. The author, who is also an actress with degrees from Yale and Columbia Law School and perhaps best known for her appearances in films like “Hitch” and “Fifty Shades Darker,” has described encountering “the face of a boy I’d never seen in a band I’d never paid attention to” and thinking it was “art.” After the novel became a viral sensation, Lee told Vogue in 2020, “This was never supposed to be a book about Harry Styles.” In a piece for Time published this month, Lee argued that “assuming a novel with a fictional celebrity in a relationship must be based on an existing celebrity — in this case, the internet has decided, Harry Styles — is unimaginative at best and sexist at worst.”She is certainly less explicit about a pop star connection than Anna Todd, whose “After” series of novels started explicitly as Styles fan fiction on the platform Wattpad and have since been turned into a film franchise. (It’s a path that might be familiar to fans of “Fifty Shades,” which started as “Twilight” fan fiction.) However, unlike “The Idea of You,” the “After” series has nothing to do with a boy band. The Harry of “After” is a college student named Hardin, but when the first novel was published in 2014, the portrayal outraged some One Direction lovers with the way it turned Styles into a bad boy manipulating a young woman. One 14-year-old Styles fan told The New York Times then: “The way Harry in this book is portrayed is disgusting.”On the other hand, Styles fans have embraced “The Idea of You” as text that can feed their obsession. Kayla Kleinman, a social media manager at Bookshop.org, was not a Styles devotee when she first read the novel, but became one after finishing it during the pandemic. She felt “emotionally attached” to the book, and wanted the experience of reading it to continue, she said in an interview. So she sought out Styles’s music. “In my head it felt like a continuation of the story even though I very much knew that they were not,” she said. “But to me that next step was being like, ‘OK, I’m going to dive into this world as a thing to entertain myself.’” Now Kleinman has even gone to Harry Styles concerts with a friend she made from an “Idea of You” Facebook group.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Idea of You’ Review: Surviving Celebrity

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      Anne Hathaway headlines a movie that’s got a lot to say about the perils of fame.Women of a certain age (that is, my age) feel like they grew up alongside Anne Hathaway, because, well, we did. We were awkward teens together when she made “The Princess Diaries” in 2001. We felt ourselves to be put-upon entry-level hirelings right when “The Devil Wears Prada” came out in 2006. We understood her broken-down narcissistic addict in “Rachel Getting Married,” because who couldn’t? And we watched the Hathaway backlash, pegged to public perception that she was trying too hard, and worried that people saw us the same way.Now we’re 40-ish. We know for sure that Gen Z considers millennials to be cringe, and, thankfully, we no longer feel the need to care. The greatest gift of reaching middle age is having settled into yourself, and that is apparently what Hathaway, age 41, has done. She has been through the celebrity wringer (and more) and come out the other side looking radiant, with a long list of credits in movies that swing from standard commercial fare to auteurist masterpieces.This is perhaps why it’s so satisfying to see her name come first — alone, before the title credit — in “The Idea of You,” which is on its surface a relatively fluffy little film. Based on the sleeper hit novel by Robinne Lee, “The Idea of You” is plainly fantasy, in the fan fiction mold, that poses the question: What if Harry Styles, the British megastar and former frontman of One Direction, fell madly in love with a hot 40-year-old mom? In this universe, the Styles character is Hayes Campbell (Nicholas Galitzine), the British frontman of a five-member boy band called August Moon.Hathaway plays Solène Marchand, an art gallery owner whose arrogantly useless ex-husband, Daniel (Reid Scott), buys v.i.p. meet-and-greet tickets for their 16-year-old daughter, Izzy (Ella Rubin), and her two best friends, all of whom were huge August Moon fans … in the seventh grade. The event is at Coachella, and Daniel is set to take the teenagers but backs out at the last second, citing a work emergency. Solène reluctantly agrees to take them, and while at the festival, mistakes Hayes’s trailer for the bathroom. They meet, it’s cute, and you can guess what happens next.Or can you? It was clear about 10 minutes into the movie that what was required for enjoyment was to surrender to the daydreaming, and so, with very little internal protest, I did. How could I resist? Solène is smart, competent, kind and secure; she has great hair and a great wardrobe; and most important, she seems like a real person, even if the situation in which she finds herself greatly stretches the bonds of credibility. More than once, I was struck by how authentically 40 Solène seemed to me — a woman capable of making her own decisions, even ones she thinks might be ill-advised — and how weirdly rare it is to see that kind of character in a movie. She has a kid, and friends, and a career. She reads books and looks at art, and she is flattered by this 24-year-old superstar’s attention but takes a long time to come around to the idea that it may not be a joke.Solène also feels real shame and real resolve in the course of the winding fairy tale story, which predictably has to go south. But most of all, she’s in a movie that doesn’t try to shame her, or patronize her, or make her appear ridiculous for having desires and fantasies of her own. She’s just who she is, and it’s simple to understand her appeal to someone whose life has never been his own.Directed by Michael Showalter, who wrote the adapted screenplay with Jennifer Westfeldt, “The Idea of You” succeeds mostly because of Hathaway’s performance, though she and Galitzine spark and banter pleasurably (and he can dance and sing, too). It tweaks the novel in a number of ways — Hayes is older than the book’s character, for one thing — and also seems to implicitly know it’s a movie, and that movies have a strange relationship with age-gap romances.In fact, that’s one of its strengths. Several times, characters remark on the double standard attached to people’s judgment of Solène and Hayes’s relationship, hypothesizing that in a gender-swapped situation, people would be high-fiving the older man who landed the hot younger star. Sixteen years looks like a lot on paper, but in the movies, at least, it is barely a blip.That musing is interesting enough, if a familiar one. More fascinating in “The Idea of You” is its treatment of the cage of celebrity. Hayes seems mature compared with his bandmates and the girls who follow them around, but he’s also clearly stuck in some kind of arrested development. And I do mean stuck: He is self-aware enough to tell Solène, plaintively, that he auditioned for the band when he was 14 and not much has changed beyond his level of fame. He wants a life beyond the spotlight, badly.And that’s just what he can’t get. Neither can Solène, nor, eventually, anyone around her. The idea of living a quiet life might obviously be out of reach, but the added elements of tabloid news and rabid fans unafraid to treat Hayes as if they know him make things far worse. The film starts to feel a little like the tale of a monster, but the monster is parasociality, encouraged by the illusion of intimacy that the modern superstar machine relies on to keep selling tickets and merch and albums and whatever else keeps the star in the spotlight.It’s probably coincidental that “The Idea of You” comes on the heels of Taylor Swift’s latest album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” on which she strongly implies that her carefully cultivated fandom has made her love life a nightmare. But spiritually, at least, they’re of a piece — even if the origins of the film’s plot seem as much borne of parasociality as a critique of it. And that makes Hathaway’s performance extra poignant. She’s been dragged into that buzz saw before. And somehow, she’s figured out how to make a life on the other side of it.The Idea of YouRated R for getting hot and heavy, plus some language. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. Watch on Prime Video. More

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      in Television

      Nicholas Galitzine Wants to Prove He’s More Than Just a Pretty Face

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      Known for playing princes and their modern equivalents, this British actor hopes his steamy new drama, “Mary & George,” will change how Hollywood sees him.“I’ve often found that the way people see me is very different from how I see myself,” Nicholas Galitzine said. “People attribute a pristineness to me.”This was on a recent morning in a rococo hotel room, just west of Madison Square Park. (How rococo? Imagine Fragonard macrodosing on psilocybin.) Galitzine, who recently relocated from London to Los Angeles, was in New York for a few days to promote “Mary & George,” a steamy historical drama in which he stars as George Villiers, the ambitious lover of King James I. It premieres Friday on Starz. Next month, he will also appear as Hayes, a boy-band sensation in an age-gap romance, in the giddy Amazon rom-com “The Idea of You.”Boyishly handsome, with lips like plumped throw pillows and a jawline that is frankly ridiculous, Galitzine, 29, is often cast as princes (“Cinderella,” “Red, White & Royal Blue”), straight and gay, or as modern-day prince equivalents — a pop phenom, a football star. That’s how Hollywood has seen him: patrician, elegant.“Refined, maybe, is a word,” he said. (That upmarket English accent? It helps.) But refined is not an adjective he applies. He described himself instead as “chaotic,” as “messy,” which princes aren’t always allowed to be.“That’s a tricky thing sometimes, playing princes and people expecting that,” he said. “The reality is very different.”In the Starz period drama “Mary & George,” Julianne Moore and Galitzine play a scheming mother and son.StarzWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      In “Mary and George,” Julianne Moore Is a Scheming Mom

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      In the historical drama “Mary and George,” new on Starz, Julianne Moore plays an ambitious mother whose son catches the eye of King James I of England.Standing in a shadowy archway on a bridge leading into Broughton Castle in Oxfordshire, England, sheep nibbling the grass below, Julianne Moore curtsied deeply, lowering her eyes before a splendidly gowned woman. “Your Majesty,” she began, before being drowned out by a loud “baa” from the sheep. Moore burst out laughing, as did her fellow actress, Trine Dyrholm, who was playing Queen Anne of England. “Talk to the sheep!” Moore commanded the director, Oliver Hermanus. “Tell them we’re doing a TV mini-series!”That mini-series is the visually sumptuous, seven-part “Mary and George,” strewn with sex scenes that look like Caravaggio paintings and riddled with all the good things: intrigue, scheming, cunning and villainy. The show, which premieres on Starz on April 5, was inspired by Benjamin Woolley’s 2018 nonfiction book, “The King’s Assassin,” and tells the mostly true tale of Mary Villiers (Moore), a minor 17th-century aristocrat with major ambitions, and her ridiculously handsome son, George (Nicholas Galitzine), who she uses as a path to power and riches at the court of King James I (Tony Curran).James likes ridiculously handsome young men. “The king,” says Mary’s new husband, Lord Compton, “is a dead-eyed, horny-handed horror who surrounds himself with many deceitful well-hung beauties.”From left: Laurie Davidson as the Earl of Somerset, Tony Curran as King James I and Trine Dyrholm as Queen Anne.StarzGeorge’s ascent isn’t easy: Mary must get the current favorite, the Earl of Somerset (Laurie Davidson), out of the way; forge and break alliances; and murder the odd opponent. George, naïve and insecure, must learn how to deploy his beauty and charm. But over the course of the series, George becomes a powerful political figure, with Mary a formidable, frequently antagonistic, presence alongside him.“These are people who use sex not just for intimacy and relationship building, but for power, as a transaction,” Moore said in a video interview. “The most compelling thing to me about Mary was that she was very aware of how limited her choices were. She had no autonomy, her only paths are through the men she is married to, or her sons.” George, she said, “is almost her proxy; he has access to a world she doesn’t have.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 50 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Bottoms’ Review: Physical Education

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      In this buddy comedy, senior outcasts played by Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri attempt to woo two cheerleaders through a fight club.Josie and PJ are high school seniors, and they have some pressing unfinished business. “Do you want to be the only girl virgin at Sarah Lawrence?” PJ (Rachel Sennott) asks Josie (Ayo Edebiri) during the dark-night-of-the-soul conversation that begins “Bottoms.” Yes, Emma Seligman’s comedy takes off with tires screeching.It is imperative for our buddies to have sex, stat, but that is a complicated proposition: Not only are they unpopular outcasts — “the ugly, untalented gays,” as opposed to the ones who breezily sashay down the hallways — but they have set their sights on two unapproachably hot cheerleaders. It is obvious that PJ and Josie will need some devious scheming to win over their crushes.Going along with a rumor that they’ve spent time in juvenile detention, the pair acquire an instant reputation as tough girls and the school lets them start a self-defense club in which the most vicious brawls are somehow allowed. Even Josie’s object of desire, Isabel (Havana Rose Liu), is impressed by consciousness-raising through punching, even more so after she learns her quarterback boyfriend (Nicholas Galitzine, of “Red, White & Royal Blue”) is cheating on her.Seligman and Sennott’s first collaboration was the quietly unsettling “Shiva Baby” (2021), which took place almost entirely over the span of one afternoon at the title wake, and progressively ensnared Sennott’s character in a web of deadpan, discomforting humor. For their follow-up, the collaborators (Sennott wrote the movie with Seligman) have gone down a completely different stylistic road, putting a queer spin on teenage sex comedies à la “Superbad” and “American Pie.” They have replaced the death by a thousand cuts of “Shiva Baby” with a gleeful broadness. It ultimately fizzes out, but “Bottoms” confirms that Seligman and Sennott are major new forces in American comedy.A lot does click here, including several delicious supporting performances, most notably the former N.F.L. running back Marshawn Lynch as the fight club’s loopy faculty adviser and Ruby Cruz as Hazel, a cool classmate whom, naturally, PJ does not even see. The script also lands many corkers, as when a student named Annie (Zamani Wilder) complains “this is the second wave all over again” after realizing PJ and Josie were prioritizing self-serving goals over sisterhood.That last aspect is what feels most undernourished and, in the end, unexpectedly timid. Not much is made of the fact that PJ is one of the biggest liars and bullies of the story and uses her gift of gab to cynically deploy empowerment messaging. And while the movie is set in a surreally heightened universe in which football players never leave their uniform and teachers read girlie magazines in class, it is oddly more comfortable goofing off with outrageous violence than elementary sexuality.For most of its tight running time, “Bottoms” hovers on the cusp of greatness. It’s often funny but it also never delivers satisfying set pieces, and stops short of questioning — not to mention subverting — the warped high school stratification that remains one of America’s building blocks.BottomsRated R for typical teen language, fight-club violence and football run amok. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. In theaters. More

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      How ‘Red, White & Royal Blue’ Reimagined a BookTok Sensation

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      The filmmakers didn’t want to disappoint fans of Casey McQuiston’s novel about the romance between a U.S. president’s son and a British prince.On most Fridays, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London closes at 10 p.m. sharp. But one night last summer, after all of the tourists had spilled back onto the streets of South Kensington, two men slow-danced among the Berninis and Rodins until the sun rose the next morning. A cover of “Can’t Help Falling in Love” by the indie-pop singer Perfume Genius echoed through the sculpture hall, soundtracking their tender moment.The nocturnal scene was a scripted one from “Red, White & Royal Blue,” the film adaptation of the 2019 novel by Casey McQuiston. The two men under the dimmed lights were the actors Taylor Zakhar Perez and Nicholas Galitzine, and they swayed until the director, Matthew López, called “Cut!” around 2 a.m. for a lunch break.“It was just the three of us and our crew,” said López, who’s also the film’s co-writer. “It made for an incredibly intimate, really special night.”The romantic comedy follows Alex Claremont-Diaz, the bisexual son of the first female U.S. president (played by Uma Thurman, with a thick Southern drawl), and Prince Henry, the younger brother of the heir to the British throne who has known since birth that he’s “gay as a maypole.” What starts as a simmering rivalry between the impulsive American (Zakhar Perez) and the buttoned-up Brit (Galitzine) soon develops into a clandestine relationship. Neither is publicly out, and their secret love complicates things, especially for Henry.Amazon Studios and Berlanti Productions secured the film rights to McQuiston’s novel at auction ahead of its May 2019 release, and the book has since spent more than 20 weeks as a New York Times best seller.But best-seller lists don’t fully convey the adoration that “Red, White & Royal Blue” has garnered on BookTok — the literature-loving corner of TikTok — where fans have shared their obsession with the escapist love story en masse, and videos tagged #redwhiteandroyalblue have received more than 500 million views.Jacob Demlow, who frequently posts about “Red, White & Royal Blue” on his “A Very Queer Book Club” account, said he flung his copy across the room in delight when he first encountered it.“I couldn’t believe what I was reading. It was all these amazing tropes that romance lovers have loved forever, but there was a couple in it who looked like a couple I would be in,” said Demlow, who estimated that he’d read the novel at least a dozen times. “I grew up watching movies about the girl falling in love with the prince, but I’d never seen that through a queer lens before. It was kind of earth-shattering in ways I still don’t fully know if I can comprehend.”The film, premiering on Prime Video on Friday, hopes to recreate that excitement onscreen, and represents the directorial debut of López, a Tony-winning playwright known for penning “The Inheritance,” as well as writing (with Amber Ruffin) the musical adaptation “Some Like It Hot.” López was working on those projects in 2020 when his agent first floated the idea of turning “Red, White & Royal Blue” into a stage musical.“I read it and said, ‘Yeah, sure, maybe. But let’s talk about the movie,’” López recalled. “I knew I wanted to be the person who made this film by, like, Page 50.”The director Matthew López, at right, working with his stars on set. “I knew I wanted to be the person who made this film by, like, Page 50,” he said.Rob Youngson/AmazonAfter pleading his case to the producers Greg Berlanti and Sarah Schechter, López signed on to direct and did a second pass on an original script by Ted Malawer. He cast two lead actors who had cut their teeth on Netflix romances: Zakhar Perez, 31, who starred as Marco in “The Kissing Booth” sequels; and Galitzine, 28, who appeared in the streamer’s military romance “Purple Hearts.” Galitzine also played the prince in Amazon’s Camila Cabello-led “Cinderella.”For both Zakhar Perez and the director, the character Alex’s biracial identity was particularly meaningful. López grew up in Panama City, Fla., with his Puerto Rican father and Polish Russian mother, while Zakhar Perez is of Mexican, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean descent and was raised in northwest Indiana, where he said there was only one other Mexican family.“Matthew and I talked a lot about the mestizo journey,” Zakhar Perez said in a video call before SAG-AFTRA, the actor’s union, went on strike. “Being part Mexican, part lots of other things, I don’t want to say you’re forgotten, but in today’s world, it’s like, you’re either this or you’re that. There’s nothing in between. I’m kind of a cultural chameleon.”“As a young Latiné queer man, I never read something that centered someone like Alex,” López said, echoing his star. “If I had been presented with this character when I was in my late teens, early 20s, it may have changed how I thought about myself.”During the audition process, Zakhar Perez and Galitzine did their chemistry reads via video and did not meet in person until rehearsals began in London. But the nature of the script meant they would need to quickly become comfortable shooting a variety of passionate scenes, which were overseen by the intimacy coordinator Robbie Taylor Hunt.“Nick and I trusted each other quite quickly,” Zakhar Perez said of Galitzine. “We had to build a sexual tension from dislike to like to love, and we wanted to show that journey through the choreographed, intimate moments.”“I was never going to entirely fulfill the image of this book that the millions of people who love it individually have in their heads,” López said.Jonathan Prime/AmazonIn the book, McQuiston described Alex and Henry’s amorous bedroom — and tack room and hotel room — scenes in great detail, and López said he “never, ever shied away from the sexuality” onscreen.“At times, it’s extremely hungry and at times, it’s really tender,” Galitzine said in a separate prestrike call. “Matthew was always adamant that he wanted to portray gay sex in an accurate way, which he felt maybe hadn’t been the case in other L.G.B.T.Q.+ movies.”While the only lingering sex scene is a carefully cropped, emotional moment, and the only nudity is the flash of a naked buttocks, “Red, White & Royal Blue” received an R rating from the Motion Picture Association.López was surprised: “If we had put six bullets into the prince, we probably would have still gotten PG-13,” he said, and added, “If it had been a man and a woman, I question whether or not it would have gotten an R rating.”(The filmmaker Ira Sachs recently expressed similar confusion over the NC-17 rating for his new film “Passages,” which also features gay sex. The M.P.A. said in a statement to The Associated Press, “The sexual orientation of a character or characters is not considered as part of the rating process.”)In the weeks leading up to the movie’s release, anticipation continued to build among fans, coupled with fears that it might not capture the magic of the book. Some worried about the casting choices, the elimination of several supporting characters or the switch from a fictional queen of England to a fictional king, played in a single scene by Stephen Fry.“I was never going to entirely fulfill the image of this book that the millions of people who love it individually have in their heads,” López said. “I knew from the beginning,” he also emphasized, “that this movie would succeed or fail based in part on the fans’ belief that one of them has made this film. I am one of them.”Broader critiques take issue with the premise of the story itself and the fact that it’s yet another queer romance that involves the distress of coming out. But Demlow of A Very Queer Book Club sees it differently.“There are so many coming-out stories that need to be heard, and we also need more stories that aren’t coming-out stories,” he said. “It’s not that we need less of something. It’s that we need more of everything.” More

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      ‘Red, White & Royal Blue’ Review: Keep Calm and Pine On

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      This film, about an American president’s son who falls for a British prince, starts with a giddy premise and has the derring-do to succeed.Like a corgi back-flipping over a bathtub of champagne, “Red, White & Royal Blue” starts with a giddy premise and has the derring-do to succeed. The setup is thus: Alex (Taylor Zakhar Perez), the wild child of the White House, is commanded to clean up an international PR disaster by befriending Prince Henry (Nicholas Galitzine), the cloistered British spare. In the film’s first half, the scions secretly fall in love; in the second, they fret that going public might cause another global kerfuffle just as Alex’s mother (a Southern-drawling Uma Thurman) campaigns for re-election.It sounds like fan fiction and looks like it, too, particularly when Galitzine dips his chin bashfully — a tic that Princess Diana passed on to her boys. Yet, as in any screwball romance worth its trans-Atlantic sea-salt, the first-time director Matthew López gets us rooting for the cheeky couple’s transition from rivals to romantic bedfellows, boosted by the cinematographer Stephen Goldblatt, who photographs the leads so adoringly that you half-expect them to turn to the camera and hawk a bottle of cologne. Thanks to their playful chemistry, we’re sold.The film is a heavily trimmed adaptation of Casey McQuiston’s zesty 2019 novel, a TikTok smash whose hashtag boasts more than 500 million views. López (best-known as the Tony-winning playwright of “The Inheritance”) wrote the script with Ted Malawer, and the two add theatrical flourishes that feel over-florid: a late-night phone chat visualized by having Galitzine magically appear in a whirl of digital leaves; a museum stroll voice-over that’s so odd, you wonder if it was a postproduction fix for something gone awry; and, most goofily, an across-the-dance-floor stare-down where Alex and Henry lock eyes as the other revelers, grooving to Lil Jon, get so low that they appear to be playing Duck, Duck, Goose.But the story smartly zeros in on the couple’s cultural gap — or, as Alex expresses it, “He grabbed my hair in a way that made me understand the difference between rugby and football.” Henry has borne a heavy crown since birth and wears his privilege matter-of-factly, though he dreams of anonymity. The Yank is, true to stereotype, brash and idealistic. He remembers being an invisible suburban kid who vowed to accomplish goals that were out of reach for his father (Clifton Collins Jr.), a Mexican immigrant. (Perez also seems aware that his angular cheekbones and roguish swagger make him resemble a young Al Pacino.) Their centerpiece sex scene is intimately staged with Galitzine tracing Perez with his fingertips as though his character wants to remember the moment forever.The D.C. sequences are snappy, freshened-up versions of the banter we’ve long seen on TV. (Sarah Shahi as the president’s no-nonsense aide and Aneesh Sheth as a gruff Secret Service officer are standouts.) Though the credits list a royal etiquette adviser, it’s hard to gauge if this depiction of the monarchy is accurate (paisley loungewear, tiny topiaries, gilt-framed everything) or just a gaga fantasy that allows a prince to coo, “I went to an English boarding school. Trust me, you’re in good hands.”Red, White & Royal BlueRated R for swearing and some royal hanky-panky. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes. Watch on Amazon Prime Video. More