Dave Franco

Somebody I Used to Know

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Sean and Ally drink wine together

Like some sort of cosmic ordering service, romances and romantic comedies work to put together people who deserve to be together. But what happens if the people concerned don’t deserve to be together? That’s what Alison Brie and Dave Franco’s Somebody I Used to Know sets out to discover. Married couple Brie and Franco co-wrote it, Franco directs and Brie stars, as the Hollywood burnout who heads back to the small town where she grew up after her TV show, Dessert Island (a baking meets dating reality thing), gets canned. There she bumps into the ex she bailed out on suddenly ten years before to go and make it big in Hollywood. The … Read more

The Rental

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Alison Brie, Sheila Vand, Dan Stevens and Jeremy Allen White

Take your pick – The Rental is a deliberately confounding amalgam of genres or a film that can’t work out what it wants to be. It starts out looking like one of those cabin in the woods things, and we meet two couples – Charlie (Dan Stevens) and Michelle (Alison Brie), Josh (Jeremy Allen White) and Mina (Sheila Vand) – as they’re arriving at a secluded and fabulous place by the coast, complete with ocean view and hot tub. They also have a dog in tow, which the rules of the rental explicitly forbid. But they’re entitled “white privilege” kind of guys and so those rules don’t apply. Actually, one of them, Mina, isn’t white … Read more