Anna (Halle Bailey) doesn’t have great boundaries in other people’s homes. Her tendency to make herself entirely too comfortable gets her into trouble as a house sitter, but that specific quirk ultimately leads to her romantic good fortune during a spontaneous trip to Italy, so how bad can it really be?

In fact, if Anna had never donned the wardrobe of her high-end client (Nia Vardalos) to walk the dog in a fit of wealth cosplay, she never would have gotten fired in time to meet an Italian hunk, Matteo (Lorenzo de Moor), who inspires the trip that unfolds in “You, Me & Tuscany,” directed by Kat Coiro and scripted by Ryan and Kristin Engle. So really, the message here is that we should all be more impulsive and slightly unhinged — Anna ends up living her Tuscan dreams after all.

Running off to Italy and into the arms of an earthy Mediterranean man holding a big bowl of pasta is a specifically American, female-friendly kind of fantasy that’s been depicted on-screen before, in travelogues like “Under the Tuscan Sun” and “Eat Pray Love,” both name-checked in “You, Me & Tuscany.” The Vardalos cameo also connects the dots between this film and “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” both with large, cartoonishly ethnic families enthusiastically champing at the bit to plan a marriage ceremony.

But first, how do we get from unemployed house sitter to impending Italian nuptials? Anna, a culinary school dropout, is drifting from gig to gig, grieving her mother, who was a chef, when she meets Matteo at a hotel bar. He enthralls her with stories of his Tuscan hometown and currently empty villa, having run away from the burden of his family’s expectations. Anna takes it as a sign and books a flight. She turns up in his hometown and, with nowhere else to stay, helps herself to his villa while Matteo gallivants around the States, blissfully ignorant.

Later, while trying on a random diamond ring she finds (see aforementioned boundary issues), Matteo’s family turns up. They put two and two together, add a few assumptions and Anna goes with it, letting his mother Gabriella (Isabella Ferrari) indulge in a best-case scenario. Then she meets Matteo’s cousin/adopted brother Michael (Regé-Jean Page of “Bridgerton” fame), a soulful winemaker, and things get complicated. There’s also a family restaurant that’s struggling and could really use the help of a talented would-be chef obsessed with Italian cuisine.

There are almost too many romance tropes in “You, Me & Tuscany” to take it seriously: fake dating, a journey from being enemies to lovers, a fiancé’s brother, etc. So many plot points and characters keeps things jam-packed in what’s essentially a Hallmark movie with a travel budget. But for an outlandish romance set in a theme-park version of Italy that features more slow-motion shots of food being tossed in the air than an ’80s McDonald’s commercial, it’s actually pretty charming.

Anna has an angel and a devil on each shoulder, neither of whom she listens to very much. One is her best friend Claire (Aziza Scott) in New York, who’s always encouraging her to make the prudent choice. The other is her Italian taxi driver Lorenzo (Marco Calvani), who suggests she tell the truth but agrees that her way is more romantic. They synthesize and parrot back the script’s outrageous plot points, serving as a Greek chorus, though being reasonable wouldn’t push Anna toward her destiny.

As a romantic lead, Page could do this blindfolded with one arm tied around his back — he’s just that handsome and smooth. He even manages to pull off an a cappella version of the 2004 Mario R&B ballad “Let Me Love You” without drifting into cringe territory.

Bailey has a wide-eyed clueless cuteness that lends to her character’s well-meaning naiveté — even her missteps have a way of working out. She brings a sort of Disney princess innocence and pluck to Anna, which makes sense considering she played Ariel in the live-action “The Little Mermaid.”

There are limits to Bailey’s charm, though. She manages comedy much better than sincerity but Coiro knows how to work around it, punctuating her big speeches with quick cutaways to comic relief so we don’t dwell on them too much. The script grounds its fantasy in real emotional traumas and triggers: Anna and Michael bond over losing parents and the competition between brothers resonates authentically. Even if the setting and circumstances are over the top, the choices the characters make track as actual human behavior (if heightened).

But most importantly, “You, Me & Tuscany” is self-aware. It’s transporting and ridiculous and knows exactly what it is, and therefore, we do too. So go ahead, enjoy a little dolce vita as a treat.

Katie Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.

An independent review of the BAFTA Film Awards has found a “number of structural weaknesses” in planning, escalation procedures, and crisis coordination before John Davidson‘s Tourette’s outburst.

Davidson, an executive producer on the BAFTA-winning I Swear, dominated headlines for weeks after involuntarily shouting the n-word as Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo presented the award for best visual effects at the 79th British Academy Film Awards on Feb. 22.

The BBC has had its own questions to answer after airing the slur despite the two-hour tape delay, and just this week also ruled the incident a breach of the broadcaster’s editorial standards. Chief content officer Kate Phillips has maintained the breach was “not intentional,” though former director-general Tim Davie was unable to say why the ceremony remained available to stream on BBC iPlayer 15 hours after the event.

On Friday, a review commissioned by the BAFTA board and carried out by RISE Associates concluded its findings on what happened and what must change. Sent to The Hollywood Reporter, the review identified “a number of structural weaknesses” across the British Academy’s planning and crisis management.

“However,” said a note from the BAFTA board, “it did not find evidence of malicious intent on the part of those involved in delivering the event. We accept its conclusions in full.”

The board continued: “We apologize unreservedly to the Black community, for whom the racist language used carries real pain, brutality, and trauma; to the disability community, including people with Tourette Syndrome, for whom this incident has led to unfair judgement, stigma, and distress; and to all our members, guests at the ceremony and those watching at home. What was supposed to be a moment of celebration was diminished and overshadowed.”

The statement added: “We have written to those directly impacted on the night to apologize.”

The review is clear that while it is “not a failure of intent,” BAFTA’s planning and processes “have not kept pace with its diversity and inclusion goals.” The board also admits they did not “adequately anticipate or fully prepare for the impact of such an incident in a live event environment and as a result our duty of care to everyone at the ceremony and watching at home fell short.”

Work is already underway to address the specific areas of improvement recommended in the review to reduce the risk of this happening again. This includes improving the escalation process and the chain of information sharing around BAFTA Awards ceremonies, strengthening how they plan for and deliver access, inclusion, and support at their events, and addressing any internal cultural gaps or lack of knowledge that “may prevent BAFTA from meeting its commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion across all our work.”

The BBC, too, has vowed to learn from their mistakes and prevent history from repeating itself. The corporation has set out measures to improve event planning, live production, and the iPlayer takedown processes.

The backlash from the incident lasted weeks. Davidson claimed he was “deeply mortified” if anyone thought his tics were “intentional.” It became a topic of discussion at the NAACP Image Awards, as well as the subject of a bad-taste SNL sketch that had The Hollywood Reporter asking: Is there a U.S.-U.K. gap on Tourette’s education?

How do you follow up a movie that begins with a woman being impregnated by a Cadillac and then travels so far from that point that by the end it could reasonably be described as tender? For Julia Ducournau—the sick, twisted, and, yes, French mind behind instant body-horror classics Raw (2016) and Titane (2021)—you retreat inward instead of expanding outward: more personal, more small-scale, and much, much more baffling.

Her third feature film, Alpha, could be described as an AIDS allegory, a sci-fi fable about familial trauma, or maybe an unsentimental addiction drama if you really want to get understated about it. In no world, however, is this the same brand of horror film on which Ducournau built her reputation. The title character is a 13-year-old girl who in the opening scene is given a stick-and-poke tattoo with a dirty needle while high at a party. The tattoo is a jagged “A” for “Alpha,” on her bicep, and while she’s anxious about the visible infection and accompanying oozing, her mother is much more concerned about an incurable autoimmune disease that has been spreading via bodily fluids since the mid 80s. If this unnamed virus sounds eerily familiar, then you already know the symptoms: Patients begin coughing up red dust, then their skin turns to craggly stone, and over time their entire body solidifies into polished marble. As Alpha waits for her test results, her classmates begin to viciously excommunicate her as a possible disease vector, and, to complicate things further, her mom’s heroin-addicted brother moves into Alpha’s bedroom for the indefinite future to detox for good.

As we hopscotch back and forth in time, eventually building to a climax that takes place in both the past and the present at once, things get unwieldy. Narrative coherence starts to slip away, and the bonk-you-over-the-head literary references begin to bonk with ever-greater force. This is a movie in which a young woman is literally branded with a scarlet letter “A” that turns her community against her, and that’s before the mysterious figure in red from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” makes a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo. You may find it all a bit pretentious.

But subtlety is passé, and even if the pieces that make up Alpha never quite fit together, it’s still extraordinary on a scene-by-scene basis. I scoffed at the AIDS-but-they-turn-into-rocks virus, but when Alpha makes eye contact with her teacher at a clinic, arm-in-arm with his dying boyfriend, there’s a sense of gutting reality that cuts through any genre trappings. Ducournau is making an AIDS film, a COVID film, a grief film, and a film about her Berber identity, and she’s doing it all in a way no other director would ever think to do it.

More than anything, it’s thrilling to be blindsided by a film that dares to take big swings in 2026, when only the most risk-averse filmmakers survive and everyone else gets chewed up and spat out by one of the five remaining studios. When given the choice between an interesting mess and a safe success, I know my answer. R, 128 min.

Limited release in theaters