It didn’t used to be this way, but thanks to the magic of streaming you can now pause anything at any time and pick up on fun little details. I don’t recommend you watch Prime Video’s “Relationship Goals” — at all — but if you do, I recommend you pause it towards the end. There’s a scene where Kelly Rowland, playing a TV executive with a long list of demands for her romantic partners, looks at a multi-page printout of her green flags. It’s full of unreasonable requirements, like having a 401K (in this economy), but also very reasonable demands, like well-groomed nose hair. Not “no” nose hair. Apparently she likes nose hair. She just needs it well-groomed. Fair enough.

In a halfway decent universe, this could have been the only interesting thing about “Relationship Goals,” a conventional, boring, forgettable romantic comedy if ever I’ve seen one. But we don’t live in a halfway decent universe. We live in one where this conventional, boring, forgettable romantic comedy isn’t even a romantic comedy. It’s a shameless promotion for a book about relationship advice, released on a streaming service that also happens to sell the book. It even features lines like, “This story hit so hard I Amazoned a copy of ‘Relationship Goals’ right away.”

If you haven’t heard of it, “Relationship Goals” is a book by Pastor Michael Todd which, if this movie is any indication, is full of mind-blowing romantic self-help tips like, if you’re not dating people you like, try dating different people, or maybe just try being single for a while. And hey, that’s not bad advice, it’s just really obvious advice. Then again it also compares people who date a lot, without a specific relationship goal, to chicken nuggets, because nobody wants to eat chicken nuggets if everyone’s touched them first. I’d like to think the book is more thoughtful and less condescending than that, but I remind you that this is a feature-length commercial for that book, and this is how they’re selling it. So maybe not?

“Relationship Goals” stars Kelly Rowland as Leah, a TV producer on a hit morning news show. She expects a big promotion after her boss retires but, surprise-surprise, the network wants her to compete with a new hire, Jarrett (Cliff “Method Man” Smith), who just happens to be the ex-boyfriend who cheated on her years ago. They’re assigned to work on a Valentine’s Day segment together — yes, together, as if that could possibly prove one is more qualified than the other — and it’s about the book “Relationship Goals,” which Jarrett says changed his life. Unlike Jarrett, Leah doesn’t want to make a puff piece commercial, which is the funniest thing about this “comedy” because that’s obviously all this is. All of it.

“Relationship Goals” runs through all the romantic comedy rhythms without ever settling on a beat. Rowland and Smith are likable performers but their banter is strained, and the film can’t settle on a structure that forces them to interact. Early in the movie they get trapped in Oklahoma, so they have to drive six hours to another airport to get back to the studio. You’d think that would be a decent framework for a rom-com. It’s familiar, but tried-and-true. Instead, we just get one brief interaction in a car, one forced gag about diner food and then they’re back home. The film set up a bit and then abandoned anything resembling a bit. Again, this is supposed to be a romantic comedy. We’re literally here for the bits. More bits, please. Why did you abandon the bits?

There’s a supporting cast in “Relationship Goals,” including a best friend who’s single and desperate (Annie Gonzalez) and another best friend who’s in a long-term relationship with no marriage prospects (Robin Thede). They exist to have problems that are easily solved by the book “Relationship Goals,” because the protagonists can’t get together until the end, and by itself that wouldn’t make it look like “Relationship Goals” has quick-fix solutions to all your romantic needs. And this movie really wants you to think it’s the perfect quick-fix.

But those characters also exist because “Relationship Goals” is following the template set forth by “Think Like a Man,” another rom-com based on and explicitly about a real-life romantic advice book. “Think Like a Man” was also a shameless commercial but it did, at least, try to be a very good commercial. “Think Like a Man” had a variety of romantic subplots that it sold with a great cast, solid dialogue and some cinematic oomph. “Relationship Goals” isn’t trying to convince us it’s a real film, it’s only doing the book commercial part. Which means it’s not even a good book commercial.

If you look back at Leah’s list of romantic requirements you’ll notice that one of them is “Enjoys film.” She tears these pages up, by the way, presumably because by that point Leah — and the movie itself — has long since given up on the concept of cinema. “Relationship Goals” isn’t as insulting as Prime Video’s “War of the Worlds,” in which the planet was literally saved by two Amazon purchases and the wonder of flying Amazon drones, but then very few films are, so that’s not a useful comparison. It’s enough that this film is insulting, unconvincing, unfunny, unromantic, and, worst of all, at least to the Amazon executives, it doesn’t even make you want to buy the damn book.

Melania Trump’s new documentary, Melania, has broken a Rotten Tomatoes record for the biggest discrepancy between critics’ scores and audience ratings in the last 27 years.

Since its release, reviews have been largely negative, with the film sitting at a measly 10 percent on the platform. However, viewers on the reviewing site have given the documentary a 99 percent, in an apparent demonstration of support for Trump.

In a one-star review for The Independent, Nick Hilton wrote: “Perhaps Melania is merely a piece of post-modern post-entertainment. After all, it is transparently not a documentary.”

Hilton continues: “Melania spends most scenes playing a staged version of herself, and shots of the first lady are composed with all the deliberateness Ratner brought to his work on X-Men: The Last Stand. This is somewhere between reality TV and pure fiction.”

However, audience members were generally interested in seeing the work behind the first lady’s lead-up to Inauguration Day, with one Rotten Tomatoes user writing, “A very private look at the work put in before inauguration. Shows her commitment to the children in need.”

“Nothing to dislike,” another five-star Rotten Tomatoes user wrote. “What an amazing movie from our beloved First Lady. I highly recommend everyone go see this film. It is inspiring whether you are male, female, left or right!!”

Other similar examples of large gaps between critic reviews and audience ratings include Transformers, which scored 57 percent with critics but 85 percent with audiences, and the 1999 film The Chosen, which critics also disliked at 26 percent as audiences raved, giving it a 91 percent.

The gap in reviews comes after the box office numbers of the documentary were revealed last weekend. Melania had exceeded box office predictions on its opening day, grossing $2.9 million from 1,778 theaters.

Speaking to reporters at the film’s premiere at the Kennedy Center last week, President Donald Trump played down reports of weak ticket sales for the film.

“It’s a very tough business in theaters selling movie tickets after Covid,” he said. “I think this will do unbelievable — streaming and everything. Theaters are a different world.”

While analysts predicted the controversial film to make between $1 million and $5 million through its opening weekend, Variety reports it is on course to bank around $8.1 million.

Although the film has performed better than expected, it is still unlikely to recoup the $40 million Amazon MGM paid for it. Amazon reportedly spent an additional $35 million to market the film.

Melania will stream on Prime Video at a later date.

At the Cannes Film Festival last year, there were not one but two genre-bending, metaphorical movies that revisited the deadly AIDS crisis of the 1980s.

The first was Palme d’Or laureate Julia Ducournau’s explosive and overzealous body horror flick, Alpha, in which the infected became living and breathing human sculptures, their skin hardening into marble that looked real enough to cut into a fabulous kitchen countertop.

The second and less buzzy feature was debuting Chilean director Diego Céspedes’ The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo (La misteriosa mirada del flamenco), which walked away with the top prize in the fest’s Un Certain Regard sidebar. In this touchingly surreal story, AIDS is an unknown plague transmitted by looking too lovingly into the eyes of the infected, causing turmoil among the inhabitants of a remote mining town in the desert.

Céspedes captures this strange phenomenon through the viewpoint of a preteen girl, Lidia (Tamara Cortés), who lives with her trans mother, the titular Flamenco (Matías Catalán), in a ramshackle bordello populated by a rowdy gang of sex workers. The place is run by Mama Boa (Paula Dinamarca), a tough-loving madam who doesn’t mind giving a difficult client a good kick in the nuts from time to time.

It’s certainly a unique setting, and some of what happens in Flamingo seems too outlandish to be true. But things suddenly turn tragic in the last act, and what felt frivolous or folkloric becomes deadly serious when Lidia is forced to face what’s happening around her.

Until then, the story follows the pugnacious 11-year-old as she’s harassed by boys at the local swimming hole while witnessing her mom’s declining health at home. Their lives are soon at risk when one of Flamenco’s clients, Yovani (Pedro Muñoz), shows up with symptoms of the disease and blames her for his sickness, threatening to take revenge.

The gunslinging miner belongs to a band of angry men who show up at the bordello and surround it like a posse from the Wild West. But instead of delivering the usual shootout at that point, Céspedes transforms what could have been a nasty brawl into a gentle snuggle-fest between the sex workers and their unlikely lovers.

In the world of Flamingo, macho attitudes and transphobia give way to tenderness, especially during a bittersweet wedding sequence in which Mama Boa marries the bearded old prospector, Clemente (Luis Dubó). Another memorable scene involves an annual talent contest in which Flamenco lip-syncs a Latino ballad in full drag, mesmerizing all the hardened miners who’ve come to watch her perform.

Despite its bleak subject, there’s plenty of joy and warmth on display in Céspedes’ first feature, which is reminiscent of other recent Chilean fare like Sebastián Silva’s Rotting in the Sun and Sebastián Lelio’s A Fantastic Woman, both of which inventively combined genre plots with LGBTQ themes. Flamingo goes overboard on the surrealism at times, but by ultimately focusing on how Lidia comes to terms with the reality of the AIDS epidemic, it delivers a solid emotional blow by the end.

Shot in a pared-down but colorful style by Angello Faccini, Flamingo makes the most out of its limited budget and picturesque locations, which include an arid mountain range straight out of a spaghetti Western. Most of the action takes place in a dusty one-horse town whose residents have chosen to open themselves up both sexually and spiritually, paying the ultimate price for their tolerance.