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

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...

The Virgin Suicides review – Sofia Coppola’s debut rereleased with solemn trigger-warning

Sunlit suburban calm masks the shocking nature of the story itself: a horrendous tragedy in the guise of a teenage coming-of-age movie

Nearly a quarter of a century ago, Sofia Coppola made her feature directing debut with this adaptation of the literary sensation of its day: Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel about five teen sisters in 70s suburban Michigan who take their own lives. Now it is rereleased with a solemn trigger-warning disclaimer at the beginning about certain historic attitudes which might now cause offence; these are unspecified, but appears to mean the entire premise of the film, up there in the title, but which is treated more circumspectly nowadays in the context of new ideas around self-harm and “suicidal ideation”.

This was a movie which mystified as many as it entranced, and it would be honest of me to admit that I didn’t quite understand it back in 2000, and maybe don’t quite now. But I can perhaps appreciate with more clarity its artistry and poise and the confident way Coppola allows her film to be serenely mysterious and almost affectless in its sunlit suburban calm, a reticence which appears to mask the shocking nature of the story itself: a horrendous tragedy in the guise of a teenage coming-of-age movie.

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