One Night Only (2026)

Worse, potentially, than One Night Only‘s acquiescence to the notion that maybe the fascists are right about sex between consenting adults, and worse, almost certainly, than a film about the one night a year where said consenting adults are allowed to have sex foregoing sex scenes, is the fact that everyone who could have written something resembling a joke for this romantic comedy failed to do so without also turning it into a brand activation.

I spent a lot of time (at least 20 minutes, given how long trailers are and how often I saw the one for One Night Only ahead of other, mostly better times at the movies) thinking about the kind of world in which the premise was even possible, and honestly, my bad. I found it a little hard saying “this movie agrees with the fascists,” even, because its idea of the right-wing, whose political project is to strip women of their autonomy and everyone who isn’t white and/or straight of their lives is that, granted extraordinarily unlimited federal authority beyond the wildest dreams of the moral majority, that the one rule of the one day everyone could fuck is that in order to do so you need to wear a condom.

To me, this was worse writing than having the film’s one ostensibly queer character wave off the unpleasantness of the queer persecution that would come from such a society by saying that, as a community, we’ve been dancing around straight people’s laws since before Bible times. At least that’s just not true. The condom thing, on the other hand, serves the dual purpose of getting Durex and KY lubricant to pony up some dough while giving the lead characters a golden ticket to chase through the streets of New York City.

Monica Barbaro and Callum Turner have no chemistry, which is great or I’d feel a little bad for them for finding it in a movie like this, as I did for Molly Ringwald and LeVar Burton, who are cute together and actually manage to convey desire despite the film trying really hard to make something out of how weird it is for older people to have sex, or fetishes, or other things the movie is squeamish about. One Night Only is as hot as a Democratic fundraising email and, given how it ends with a one-year-later flashback postulating that the fascists win another election and the laws stay on the books, just as cynical. The worst movie I will see in 2026. God willing, the worst movie I will see this decade. Giving it 0.5 stars is the only way I can get the review box to show up.