The Invite review – A-list ensemble electrify hilarious couples night gone wrong comedy

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Sundance film festival: Olivia Wilde, Seth Rogen, Penelope Cruz and Edward Norton are exceptional in a smart and funny winner about sex, marriage and partner-swapping Not enough people managed to see last year’s self-billed “unromantic comedy” Splitsville , a shame for how tremendously entertaining it was and for what it represents at this given moment. A rigorously well-directed, genuinely funny, relatably messy look at two couples dealing with the maelstrom of non-monogamy, it was the kind of smart, well-crafted film for adults we are constantly complaining we don’t get enough of. I had a similar thrill watching The Invite at its sold-out Sundance premiere on Saturday night. Like that film, it is also about two adult couples negotiating anxieties surrounding sex with other people – and also like that film, it’s really, consistently funny and stylishly directed, made with the kind of care and rigidity that comedies just aren’t afforded now. It doesn’t have the same absurdist slaps...
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Tod Browning: the film-maker who brought the carnival to Hollywood

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A new retrospective offers another chance to appreciate the daring and often deranged films made by a director who was once the centre of a moral panic

When a kid threatens to run away and join the circus, perhaps upon being forced to eat broccoli or go to bed, they’re fantasizing about more than just independence. The traveling carnival offered an alternative way of life that appealed specifically to those uninvested in the politenesses of the grownup world. No one can make a carny shower, wear a tie or go to church. This liberation from the strictures of civilized society was a must for an ethically spotty line of work reliant on a mix of trickery, hucksterism, prurience and morbid fascination, a low art form that attracted a certain kind of scuzzy personality. The tents of the sideshow provided a home to thieves, oddballs, creeps, chiselers, dope fiends, conmen, women of ill repute, leches, lushes and any other species of degenerate in need of a paycheck. If vaudevillians were the rock stars of the pre-cinema era, then circus folk were van-dweller punks cutting a swath of blithe misbehavior from gig to gig.

Just before the turn of the 20th century, at the ripe age of 16, a bricklayer’s son named Charles Albert Browning Jr decided that these were his people and abandoned his well-heeled family to join their grubby ranks. He would spend 10 years cutting his teeth as a barker, song-and-dance man, clown and contortionist before rechristening himself Tod, the German word for “death”, conferring a ghastly gravitas. Three years later, he’d take leave of the stage with sights set on the burgeoning silent film industry, but he’d carry the lurid spirit of the big top with him through the rest of an illustrious, disreputable career.

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