Quote:
"Big-screen romantic drama, like romantic comedy, needs a conflict. When two great-looking stars play characters who lock eyes and flirt and get closer and fall in love, the pull of that chemistry is so strong that if there isn't something to keep them apart, you don't have a movie—or, at least, that's the theory. But in The Photograph, a love story that flows like a life-size swoon (it unfolds slowly, surely, riding cautious currents of hope and desire), Michael (Lakeith Stanfield), a feature writer for an online magazine called The Republic, and Mae (Issa Rae), a curator at the Queens Museum, come together and connect in a slow-groove way that's so organic and appealing you can feel the film's writer-director, Stella Meghie, not wanting to get in their way."
-- Owen Gleiberman

Source:
Gleiberman, Owen. "The Photograph: Film review; Issa Rae and Lakeith Stanfield ground a love story with some real feeling in it—a Valentine's Day movie that's less a confection than a meditation." Review of The Photograph. Variety, February 13, 2020.