Appetites: "The Invite"

Olivia Wilde's new comedy The Invite extends a long tradition of what we might call dinner-party cinema, where the key ingredients are these: a sprinkling of actors, honed to sharp but hopefully still representative points; a single, well-furnished location; a sense of a tumultuous, finally rather testing or trying evening; barbed or otherwise polished dialogue, ideally trialled in a stage setting. Mix them as you would a pre-dinner cocktail, and you end up with the kind of would-be sophisticated entertainment guests can chew over at real-world soirées: think 1967's lodestone Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Woody Allen's gossipy Husbands and Wives, the French smash Le dîner de cons, Polanski's insufferable Carnage. Adapted by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones from a Spanish play-turned-film (known locally as Sentimental and internationally as The Couple Upstairs) which has already been reworked in multiple languages, Wilde's film operates primarily as a study in radically different energies. Representing exhausted middle age: Seth Rogen (Fozzie Bear playing Oscar the Grouch, sore of back, sorer still of spirit) and Wilde herself (status-anxious, overly committed to the fate of a soufflé) as frazzled parents who see a late supper with their upstairs neighbours as a rare chance to reposition themselves as vibrant social butterflies. Gliding into this married couple's recently refurbished space: sexologist Penélope Cruz and her firefighter beau Edward Norton, who may just be everything their hosts dream of being, namely cosmopolitan (they speak Spanish!), childless, audibly passionate in their lovemaking (Wilde has warned Rogen not to complain), cool as cucumbers, and stylishly attractive in their upward mobility. The guests arrive bearing cheesecake that melts in the mouth and a proposal, indecent or otherwise, which will determine just how close our leads want to get to what these outsiders have. An alternative title floats into view: Guess Who's Coming After Dinner.

By all trustworthy reports, Wilde's previous film as director, 2022's much-hyped Don't Worry Darling, had its virtues and selling points, but its narrative chicanery got out of hand. The controlled chaos of her new project, by contrast, provides welcome reassurance that today's filmmakers haven't entirely abandoned the playbook their predecessors passed down. Wilde has found an excellent script, cast the hell out of it (perfectly, indeed), and then endeavoured not to mess up what was set on the page. Here's an overdue return for a cinema that finds ordinary people, with all their hang-ups and insecurities, fascinating; between them, McCormack, Jones and Wilde set up a tasty tag-team encounter between a couple who possibly care too much what other people think and another who have longstanding reasons for not giving a hoot. As a director, Wilde busies herself tracking shifts in energy. This night starts off cranky and awkward, as Rogen and Wilde row and the former eyes Norton from a suspicious distance; it starts to feel more convivial, as the couples split into mutually reinforcing groups of two (Rogen/Cruz, Wilde/Norton); secrets and confidences are shared, bombshells dropped; and then it all starts to get a little too much for some of the participants. Wilde wards off any residual staginess in the text by giving the couples' interactions a borderline manic antsiness, that demonstrated by folks who've been let off the leash for a night: the filmmaking has its own playful, curious, sometimes outright fruity energy, heightened only further by a mischievous Devonté Hynes score, determined to fill any gaps that it can. But Wilde also organises all this conversation intelligently: once the initial small talk is set aside, this foursome get deeper and deeper into it - until at least a couple of them realise they may have got in too deep.

A smart screenplay is one thing, but The Invite also has actors capable of improvising over the top of it for added value; once everyone's taken their seats, we're getting a symphony of people rubbing one another up the wrong way (and finding that they secretly enjoy the sensation). That Rogen has been getting the most glowing notices may partly be down to his status as the underdog in this heavyweight cast, the actor with the most to prove (despite a largely agreeable two-decade career). But his Joe is also the character who has the most to respond to: set on edge by Norton's glibness, irritated by Wilde's urge to suck up to these outsiders, at once startled, aroused and terrified by Cruz's forwardness, he's the one person in this room whom you sense would rather back out and go solo with some weed. (Which may well be the right call, all told.) Yet Wilde, turning cartwheels while hyperventilating, is almost as funny in passing, and though Norton possibly sounds too New Agey to fully convince as a fireman, he also gets a line I don't think I was expecting to hear in a mainstream film in 2026 ("Nobody in America can afford anything these days"). Towards the end, the material's roots begin to show: after all its interpersonal carnage, The Invite offers the conventional closure of a middlebrow stageplay, paying lip service to the idea that what the Rogen-Wilde pairing really needs isn't carnal knowledge but in-person couples' counselling. We're sat down too long; the laughter rate and pulse dips. Yet what comes before it really is stimulating and cheering: a fun night at the movies, a revival of the old-school farce with skill, craft and a progressive, feminist, sex-positive viewpoint (more European than American, finally), and a most effective corrective to a prevailing movie trend. The Invite is what The Drama might have been, if our comedies were still being made by grown-ups with real lives and not sniggering trolls: for once, a talking-point movie actually merits some positive talking about.

The Invite is now showing in cinemas nationwide.

Johnson's travels: "Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie"

The Canadian writer-director-actor-conceptualist Matt Johnson has used the goodwill occasioned by his leftfield tech tale BlackBerry to revive an old pet project. First launched in 2007 as a webseries and later promoted to cable television, Nirvanna The Band The Show was a shuffling postmodern sitcom that tracked two would-be creatives - trilby-sporting schemer Matt (Johnson, playing a flailing version of himself) and tagalong musician pal Jay (Jay McCarrol) - as they pottered around the streets of their native Toronto trying to catch a break, tailed by much the same diegetic camera crew as could be spotted in such millennial mock-docs as The Office and Parks & Rec. This new big-screen variation on a theme actually opens with unused footage of Matt and Jay as they were in 2008, hatching a plan for their band Nirvanna (the spelling or misspelling goes unexplained, but somehow feels pertinent) to headline local nitespot the Rivoli. Cut to: Matt and Jay in the same place in 2025, older and broader in the beam, but no closer to achieving their youthful goal. Still, Matt has a plan. Plans, even, as Matt has always had. All of which is to say you wouldn't have to be au fait with Nirvanna The Band The Series to grasp where Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie is coming from. A mix of incredibly complex planning, apparent improvisation and genuine ingenuity, Johnson's film - an answer to the question "what if Jackass had been made by Canadian brainiacs rather than all-American jocks?" - will go on to encompass a death-defying skydive from a prominent Toronto landmark, a time machine fashioned from a rusty old RV, as well as the sight of Matt and Jay, shuffling now towards middle age and its attendant crises, encountering and interacting with their own younger selves. Some of this entails traditional forms of movie trickery, but much of it has been done for real; throughout NTBTSTM, the shooting permits typically issued by municipal authorities to filmmakers never quite seem big enough to cover the full scope of Matt Johnson's imagination. Which may explain why so much of the film looks to have been shot undercover, or otherwise on the fly.

The wider the film roams, the higher it climbs, the richer this decidedly sui generis item becomes: these 100 minutes are at once an expansion or remix of the original show, a lap of honour allowing the real Matt and Jay to realise at least one of their earlier dreams, a remake of Back To The Future with heroes who couldn't be any less like the aspirational Marty McFly, a magic trick of sorts (Curt Lobb and Robert Upchurch's super-sharp cutting helps, but you'll also spend at least half the running time wondering how certain shots and effects were realised) and, in its own shambling, shrugging, insistently minor-key way, a demonstration of the cinema's infinite possibilities. NTBTSTM unfolds within a universe of wipeclean boards, where anything and everything could still happen; it involves the chicanery common to summer event movies - giving a sense that our protagonists are adrift in a world that is much bigger than it initially appears - but has none (or fewer) of the overheads and expenses. Somehow both artisanal and spectacular, the film keeps changing shape in surprising, confounding, funny ways. (One early sign Matt's thinking out of the box: the time travel movie he cites onscreen is that mad Ashton Kutcher thing The Butterfly Effect.) Best of all, Johnson makes this questing back-and-forth immense, infectious fun: watching NTBTSTM, you can physically feel the joy of someone making a film on their own terms, revisiting the buoying popular art of their youth, creating and tricking out a world of their own, and doing all of the above while hanging out and goofing off with old friends. (As in The Dirties and BlackBerry, the whole movie hinges on a bromance between two men who have nothing if they don't have each other: the middle stretch is The Butterfly Effect by way of Power Ballad.) The resulting experiment - the closest any film this summer has come to recapturing the puckish, playful, anything-goes spirit of the blockbusters of our childhood - confirms this filmmaker as a prodigious ideas man, perhaps a 21st century Preston Sturges, constitutionally unable to tell a story in the routine manner. In a healthier film ecosystem, our studio chiefs would be dangling the biggest cheques in the Western world before Matt Johnson's busy head - but maybe he's happy with playing the Rivoli.

Nirvanna The Band The Series The Movie is now showing in selected cinemas.