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...

End of Term review – art-school horror is fusion of slasher and country-house whodunnit

Weird goings-on in a basement lead to Cluedo-ish suspects and piecemeal flashbacks, but here it is the audience that suffers in the name of art

‘So, you call yourself conceptualists, do you?” says the straight-arrow detective quizzing Melissa (Chelsea Edge), a cool-customer art student with three long lacerations on her face. “Mostly. Ashley wasn’t,” Melissa replies. “Unless anti-conceptualism is a concept. She was always about being in the moment. Expressionism. Impressionism.” End of Term has a fondness for bandying around the art-theory big talk, but this silly but stolidly genre project could sorely use a conceptual cutting edge itself.

Melissa is getting questioned after being found strapped to a chair in the blood-splattered basement of Ford Barrington art school. Strangely, there are no bodies – except for that of snooty art critic Damian Self (Ronald Pickup) in the nearby space for the students’ end-of-term exhibition. In Usual Suspects-style piecemeal flashbacks, Melissa fills in the police on the buildup to the butchery and the halls of residence gallery of Cluedo-ish suspects, including her vampish one-time lover Ashley (Nicole Posener), the suave Professor Leigh (Peter Davison, a former Doctor in Doctor Who), and wild card Garth Stroman (Ivan Kaye), a rumoured ghost of a Byronic artist obsessed with a credo that art must involve pain.

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