'One Night Only' (2026): Monica Barbaro Delivers a Career-Best Performance in a Charming, Held-Back Rom-Com
Will Gluck's high-concept comedy has more fun with its premise than it does courage, but Monica Barbaro and Callum Turner's chemistry carries it a long way.
There's a version of One Night Only I was fully prepared to dislike — the one where "premarital sex is illegal except for one night a year" becomes an excuse for shock value dressed up as commentary. That's not the film Will Gluck (Anyone But You) made, and I'll admit it left me pleasantly surprised: a solid effort, built less on rigor than on charm, that seems to know exactly which parts of its outrageous premise deserve scrutiny and which ones are better left as background noise. The mandate, the biometric tattoos, the underground condom economy — all of it exists to manufacture urgency, not to interrogate consent or control, and once I stopped expecting a think piece, the movie's lighter ambitions clicked into place.
Monica Barbaro (Top Gun: Maverick) carries One Night Only in a way that feels almost unfair to her scene partners: her comic instincts, her ease inside Allie's contradictions, the way vulnerability sneaks into her line readings without asking for sympathy — this might be the best work of her career to date. Which makes it stranger to see how quickly Callum Turner (Masters of the Air) got dismissed in other reactions, because watching the two of them share a frame, I never once doubted why Owen and Allie kept circling back to each other; his tightly wound discomfort plays as the perfect counterweight to her confidence, not a liability dragging it down. Maya Hawke (Stranger Things) gets less to chew on but makes her scenes count, and Julia Fox (Uncut Gems) adds exactly the right jolt of chaos without overstaying her welcome.
Where One Night Only earns real craft points is in its sense of rhythm: the soundtrack — sly, pharmaceutical-jingle-adjacent needle drops that wink at the absurdity of the premise — does more tonal heavy lifting than half the dialogue, and Gluck shoots New York with a sun-drenched confidence that makes even throwaway scenes pleasant to sit through. The jokes land more often than not, too, especially once the movie stops explaining its own rules and just lets its leads be funny with each other.
The place where it stumbles is entirely in the setup: the first act drowns Owen and Allie in exposition before they've earned a single real scene together, and a handful of subplots — Allie's singing career chief among them — pull focus from the relationship that's actually working. The discourse around the film's near-total avoidance of sex scenes, in a movie fundamentally about sex, nagged at me more after hearing Gluck's dismissive comments on the subject than it did in the theater, and that afterthought retroactively colors a few choices as more timid than clever. Still, none of that undoes what One Night Only gets right: two performers who understand the assignment, in a story that never pretends to be smarter than the fun it's having — underscoring that sometimes a rom-com's whole job is just to make you root for two people to stop overthinking it.
Rating: B-
