When Celine Song wrote the script for her debut feature film, “Past Lives,” she was inspired by a conversation she had at a New York bar with her husband and her childhood sweetheart, who was visiting

Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans and the ubiquitous Pedro Pascal star in "Materialists," the latest from Celine Song, the director who made "Past Lives."

This is the brief and unexpected opening of Celine Song’s Materialists, a prologue that announces a certain loftiness in the film’s premise. Or in spite of it, as a sudden cut flings us into the classic opener of many a millennial rom-com: the cosmopolitan heroine at her vanity,