‘One of Them Days’ Review: Keke Palmer and SZA in a Fast-Talking Day-in-the-Life-of-the-Hood Comedy Made With a ’90s Verve

variety.com:

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “One of Them Days,” starring Keke Palmer and SZA as fast-talking, flat-broke Los Angeles roommates who have nine hours to come up with the rent money, is a winning throwback to the kind of day-in-the-hood comedy they used to make in the ’90s — movies like “Friday” (1995) and “The Players Club” (1998), which squeezed just enough texture in between the laughs to qualify as crowd-pleasing slices of life.

These movies, usually produced by New Line, were the descendants of “House Party” and Spike Lee (notably the exuberant opening 45 minutes of “Do the Right Thing”), though they were also a counterreaction to the dramas of inner-city violence that had dominated commercial Black cinema during the first half of the ’90s.

To that genre, they offered a counterbalance of raunchy, scuzzy corkscrew humanity, teaching the movie industry a lesson — about the place where diversity meets commerce — that it seems to need to keep learning over and over again.

In “One of Them Days,” Dreux (Palmer), who works as a waitress in a franchise restaurant, and Alyssa (SZA), an artist who does as little as possible, are like a comedy team who operate on advanced levels of verbal velocity.