‘The Only Living Boy in New York’ Review: Kate Beckinsale Bewitches a Manhattan Millennial

Once again, however, screenwriters get short shrift, and anyone focusing on the director’s chair will be missing out on the work of Allan Loeb, a writer who has, in the course of one year, delivered a trifecta of utterly artificial fake-deep dramas that are must-sees for connoisseurs of the cinema’s best-worst.

[...] there’s “The Only Living Boy in New York”; even though this new turkey avoids the fantasy and sci-fi elements of those previous films, it’s pure Loeb all the way, from the consistently unbelievable dialogue to his favorite screenwriting device, the “shocking” third-act reveal that proves more ludicrous than illuminating.

There’s an art to making audiences care about the problems of glossy Manhattanites who are suffering photogenically in their Architectural Digest-ready apartments, but neither Loeb nor director Marc Webb (“The Amazing Spider-Man”) seems to have the first idea of how to make these characters anything but insufferable.

In true Loeb fashion, there are unsurprising surprises and unearned happy endings ahead for this crew, but along the way we must endure countless sequences of Big Apple literati (played by the well-cast likes of Wallace Shawn and Debi Mazar) waxing nostalgic on how great the city used to be before it lost its soul, blah blah blah.

[...] the cast far outshines the material, particularly Beckinsale; history will mark that she deserved every award under the sun, including the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, for her work in “Love & Friendship,” but here she’s reduced to a pneumatic intellectual fantasy figure.