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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This is the year the Oscars found God – but can they keep the faith?

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From Conclave to The Brutalist to A Real Pain, films about religion are unusually well represented at the Academy Awards – some with decidedly unorthodox themes
• Warning: contains spoilers

What Tony Blair’s former spin doctor Alastair Campbell said of New Labour – “We don’t do God” – applies also to the Academy Awards. The secular gong-dispensing rite annually sweeps religion off its proverbial red carpet. The last best picture winner to deal with the subject was 2015’s Spotlight, which hardly proselytised for organised religion – it dramatised the Boston Globe’s investigation into sexual abuse in the Catholic church. You have to go back to 1973 to find a movie with a priestly protagonist that really beguiled the Academy: William Friedkin’s horror movie The Exorcist received 10 Oscar nominations, winning awards for screenplay and sound.

This year, though, may be different. Two leading contenders, The Brutalist (10 nominations) and Conclave (eight), put faith front and centre. And let’s not forget the perversely charming Holocaust road-trip movie, A Real Pain, shortlisted for best original screenplay and best supporting actor, for Kieran Culkin. If not exactly a meditation on Judaism, Jesse Eisenberg’s film is a beguilingly thoughtful musing on Jewish identity from a self-consciously privileged actor-director whose ancestors survived the Holocaust. A Real Pain serves as a reflection on transgenerational trauma and the meaning of religion after Nazi genocide.

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