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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The Witcher: Sirens of the Deep review – gore flows in bloody animated mer-western

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Lovejoyish dude with magical powers wanders into a seaside kingdom where merpeople and regular humans are at loggerheads

This animated feature is part of the larger Witcher fantasy franchise which started with short stories by Polish writer Andrzej Sapkowski and has evolved to survive on all manner of platforms, from video games and comics to live-action TV series and films. Thanks to the wealth of wiki knowledge out there, you can get the gist pretty quickly. There’s a dude with magical powers, fearsome pectorals (and the platinum hair of a Finnish metal band lead singer) named the Witcher, AKA Geralt (voiced here by Doug Cockle); he wanders around a medieval-ish countryside battling monsters, partly for hire and partly out of the goodness of his own gruff heart. He’s like a ronin or a knight or TV-show amateur detective of the Lovejoy vintage, but with a sword. Geralt’s wisecracking sidekick Jaskier (Joey Batey) is cowardly and comical, and plays a lute-like instrument on which he performs ballads celebrating Geralt’s heroics. We also meet (mostly in flashback) Geralt’s on-off romantic partner Yennefer (Anya Chalotra) who can visit his dreams in order to flirt with him, but she’s less of a big deal here than in other Witcher products.

Instead, Geralt and Jaskier wash up in a seaside kingdom where merpeople and regular humans are at loggerheads because the humans keep decimating the oyster beds in search of pearls. Shockingly, they don’t make use of the oysters as food, which depletes food sources for the various fantasy animals the merpeople feel are their buddies because they all live in the sea together. It’s the equivalent of a post-colonial western where the merfolk are the Native Americans and the humans are rapacious land-grabbing whites. But the script also threads in a star-crossed lovers’ story involving a mer-princess and a dopey human prince which plays out like a blend of Romeo and Juliet and The Little Mermaid. Plus, because no gen-Z skewed animation would be complete without a trans subtext, there’s a bit of that too at the end.

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