“Vanilla” Asks How You Feel About Sex Work

Theaters are closed, movies delayed, and access to press screenings are limited to streaming. There’s no better time to highlight smaller films — amazing movies without the big-studio marketing budget that makes it harder for you to find. Discover a new film festival darling and support new, emerging, and independent filmmakers. Sheltering in place doesn’t need to stop you from your weekend evening escape to the movies. Follow the flurry of upcoming reviews on Twitter, or find all my reviews for movies you can stream from right at home. Vanilla, a new dramedy by writer and director Will Dennis, is a double entendre for both ice cream and personality. Ice cream is in reference to the focus of Elliot’s aspiring start-up company that offers ice cream on demand, the Uber of ice cream. His personality is also vanilla, as we see the mundanity of his life in an opening sequence: governed by a Google calendar of the cliché entrepreneur, full of coding, meditating, exercise, meals, and scheduled naps. We learn that Elliot is vanilla in one more area of his life when he meets freewheeling aspiring comedian, Kimmie (Kelsea Bauman), in a spur-of-the moment adventure that challenges his self-perception. Taking place in the scope of a few days, there’s a lot to fit into the limited real estate of its 90-minute runtime. It’s the type of romantic comedy that happens within a single date, only this one spans a road trip from New York, where Kimmie works at a small Brooklyn pizza joint, to N…