{"id":685620,"date":"2026-06-05T08:41:09","date_gmt":"2026-06-05T08:41:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/685620\/"},"modified":"2026-06-05T08:41:09","modified_gmt":"2026-06-05T08:41:09","slug":"office-romance-review-a-happy-romcom-return-for-jennifer-lopez","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/685620\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Office Romance’ Review: A Happy Romcom Return for Jennifer Lopez"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThere\u2019s no meet-cute in \u201cOffice Romance<\/a>,\u201d but the way its lovers meet is pretty cute just the same. Formidable airline CEO Jackie Cruz (Jennifer Lopez<\/a>) summons her new company lawyer Daniel Blanchflower (Brett Goldstein<\/a>) to her office, and he walks in to see what, in cinematic terms, we shall term the full J-Lo: She\u2019s facing the window, bathed in an optimally angled shaft of afternoon sunlight, and turns around to greet him with a perfectly, effortlessly executed shampoo-commercial toss of her caramel-tinted mane. \u201cHoly shit!\u201d he says, and so do we, because, well, that\u2019s J-Lo. Or Jackie Cruz, if you prefer, but Ol Parker<\/a>\u2019s easygoing romcom is smart enough to blur that divide: It sinks into its star power as one would into a warm bath, and if the appealingly scrappy Goldstein doesn\u2019t match that voltage, that\u2019s largely the point.<\/p>\n

\n\tFrom the self-explanatory title downwards, nobody has overthought \u201cOffice Romance.\u201d It mostly hits the beats you expect in the way you expect it to, and that extends to its two leads playing enjoyably to type: high-powered glamazon goddess and very ordinary British bloke, thrown together for no reason besides the fact that they\u2019re really hot for each other. Does the chemistry between them sizzle? Yes and no. Parker\u2019s film is surprisingly explicit where it chooses to be, but not sexually so, give or take one awkward hard-on gag: It doesn\u2019t ask you to believe that \u201cHelen of Troy and Mr. Bean,\u201d in the words of its own script, would spectacularly do the nasty from the off. But you do buy that, against their own better instincts and self-estimations, they would like to, and that\u2019s enough to keep you invested.<\/p>\n

\n\tFor a star widely viewed as a queen of the genre, Lopez has made few romantic comedies that might reasonably be regarded as keepers: Most recently, \u201cSecond Act,\u201d \u201cMarry Me\u201d and \u201cShotgun Wedding\u201d all had a tinny, televisual feel to them, centering Lopez, but not treating her with any palpable care or affection. \u201cOffice Romance\u201d may be a direct-to-Netflix<\/a> release, modest in scope and technique, but it has some of the tactile, burnished warmth that we routinely saw in Nineties star vehicles \u2014 thanks in part to gleaming cinematography (by Wes Anderson regular Robert Yeoman) and production design (by industry vet Kristi Zea) that feel both comfortingly lacquered and reality-adjacent \u2014 and is reflected back on its star. Costume designer Caroline Duncan clothes her in expensive earth-toned knits and ivory pantsuits that drape like butter: It\u2019s been a while since Lopez was this thoroughly, lovingly looked after on screen. <\/p>\n

\n\tAnd thanks to Goldstein, who co-wrote \u201cOffice Romance\u201d with his \u201cTed Lasso\u201d collaborator Joe Kelly, the film has a recognizable comic voice, if not one you\u2019d immediately associate with Lopez. The language is bluer than is typical for a comfort-blanket romcom, with a key running joke that hinges on the differing impact of a certain four-letter c-word in British and American culture; a subplot that eventually calls on an unrepentantly psychopathic murderer to be an encouraging voice of reason likewise stands out for its needle-scratch strangeness. Some of these flourishes are jarringly funny, others merely stop the film momentarily in its tracks. But it doesn\u2019t feel anonymous: In what\u2019s at least partially a culture-clash story, the swings of the writing are attentive to how its characters understand each other, or don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

\n\tJackie herself is a hackneyed genre fixture: the career-obsessed high-flier with no space in her diary for a relationship. But rather than pairing her with her opposite number, \u201cOffice Romance\u201d has the subtler idea of putting two buttoned-up professionals together and gradually forcing them to make time for each other. Having relocated to the U.S. for complicated family reasons, reserved Brit Daniel still struggles with American earnestness and over-sharing, and normally wouldn\u2019t be likely to violate the strict company ban on workplace relationships. But as he\u2019s drafted in to represent Jackie in a high-stakes legal dispute with a rival airline, they\u2019re both taken off guard by how much they like each other \u2014 and they\u2019re individually likable enough that we\u2019re far less surprised, even if they don\u2019t make a ton of sense on paper.<\/p>\n

\n\tFrom there, give or take the odd tonal fillip in the script, everything proceeds according to the romcom playbook \u2014 third-act roadblocks, reconciliations and all. It\u2019s steered with the smoothly unassuming, generously star-focused approach that Parker brought to \u201cMamma Mia! Here We Go Again\u201d and the George Clooney-Julia Roberts vehicle \u201cTicket to Paradise,\u201d fittingly enough for a story that winds up a paean to maintaining professionalism with a human touch. <\/p>\n

\n\tA welcome shot of acid, however, comes from invaluable supporting player Betty Gilpin<\/a>, as Jackie\u2019s hawk-eyed, heavily pregnant deputy Sydney, opposing the budding romance with vehement, borderline-irrational hostility. Spitting her lines out like needles, glowering through her scenes with consistent, focus-pulling intensity, she imbues a stock best-friend part with such specific, vituperative heat that you wonder what kind of warped, electric love story this might have been with her opposite, well, either of the leads. Playful and cottony and just peculiar enough to be memorable, \u201cOffice Romance\u201d ultimately gives the people what they want \u2014 but if there\u2019s any gap in the market for a discomfort-viewing romcom, we know who to cast.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There\u2019s no meet-cute in \u201cOffice Romance,\u201d but the way its lovers meet is pretty cute just the same.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":685621,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[146582,60739,88,19638,206,217,291823,297984],"class_list":["post-685620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-betty-gilpin","tag-brett-goldstein","tag-entertainment","tag-jennifer-lopez","tag-movies","tag-netflix","tag-office-romance","tag-ol-parker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685620","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=685620"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685620\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/685621"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=685620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=685620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=685620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}