Review: 'The Invite' is a sharp and honest comedy centering on two couples on an intensely awkward first dinner party

In the sharply funny and brutally honest comedy “The Invite,” director Olivia Wilde starts with one question — how well do you know your neighbors? — and arrestingly falls into another question: How well do you know your spouse?

The movie starts with Wilde’s character, Angela, playing Mrs. Dalloway and buying what she needs for what she hopes is a successful dinner party. Her husband, Joe (Seth Rogen), a professional musician now working unhappily as a music teacher, is on his way home, forgetting that Angela has invited the new couple in their building.

Joe gets home and immediately he and Angela get into an argument about the new neighbors, with Joe questioning why they were invited in the first place. Angela feels a late urge to change her blouse, while begging Joe not to bring up the noise they’ve been hearing from upstairs. Joe, Angela notes, has already started in on the wine.

Then the neighbor arrive: Piña (Penelope Cruz), a sexologist, and Hawk (Edward Norton), a recently retired firefighter. Things get real weird, real fast, with Joe and Angela being both put off by and strangely attracted to this couple, who seem more in touch with their emotions and their sexuality — which leads the conversation in some strange areas.

Wilde (who directed “Booksmart” and “Don’t Worry, Darling”) has some great material to work with: It’s a remake of a Spanish comedy-drama, “Sentimental,” with an American rewrite by Will McCormick and Rashida Jones (who collaborated on the 2012 romantic comedy “Celeste and Jesse Forever”). The script moves fast, and Wilde encourages her co-stars to go fast with it — and the result is a four-person comedy of manners, like “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” played for uncomfortable laughs.

Wilde has her cast humming along so perfectly that it’s hard to say which actor is giving the best performance. Some moments it’s Rogen, letting Joe’s passive-aggressive loathing become not so passive. Other times it’s Wilde, whose Angela is flustered by the attention paid by these strangers. Norton gets a few shots in, playing Hawk as a smarmy hypersensitive male. And Cruz beguiles as Piña, who’s both instigator and observer in the mind games that proceed into the night.

“The Invite” is a smart ensemble piece where the tension and humor intertwine into something that’s as funny as it is unsettling. It’s a party you don’t want to miss.

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‘The Invite’

★★★★

Opens Friday, July 10, in theaters. Rated R for sexual material, language throughout, and drug use. Running time: 107 minutes.

Review: 'Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass' is a maniacally funny romp through Hollywood's desperate strivers

Ridiculously raunchy and spectacularly silly, “Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass” is the sort of happily nonsensical and cameo-riddled comedy as one would expect from director David Wain and his friends who gave the world “Wet Hot American Summer.”

Gail Daughtry, our titular heroine (played by Zoey Deutch), is a perky Kansas hairdresser who’s very excited to marry her sweetheart since childhood, Tom (Michael Cassidy), in a few weeks. Their relationship is so picture-perfect that even an idle conversation about their “celebrity sex pass” — the one famous person either could have consequence-free sex with — wouldn’t affect them. Until Tom runs into, and fornicates with, the celebrity on his list. (No spoilers about who the celebrity is.)

Gail is appalled at first, but then resolute to save her impending marriage — by finding and bedding her celebrity sex pass partner, the ruggedly handsome Jon Hamm. By coincidence, or the designs of Wain and co-screenwriter Ken Marino, Gail’s salon pal Otto (Miles Gutierrez-Riley) is heading to Los Angeles for a hairdresser convention, so Gail goes along to begin her quest.

The search for Jon Hamm leads Gail to befriend an odd array of characters along the way: Caleb (Ben Wang), a talent-agency intern; Vincent (played by Marino), a washed-up paparazzo; and Hamm’s former co-star Jon Slattery (played by Slattery), who seems to have hit hard times since “Mad Men” ended its run.

Meanwhile, because of a see-it-a-mile-away suitcase mix-up, Gail has a couple of Mafia hitmen (Joe Lo Truglio and Mather Zickel) tailing her, to retrieve something belonging to their wicked crime boss (Sabrina Impacciatore).

It doesn’t take long to realize what classic movie Wain and Marino are using as their plot framework. (A girl from Kansas named Gail — do the math.) One of the delights here is how they stick to that plan, referencing the movie that dare not speak its name in cleverly stupid (or stupidly clever) ways.

This being a Hollywood story, it’s no surprise that Gail and her pals run into movie stars — and Wain finds funny and outrageous ways to feature them for laughs. Wain also calls in favors, with former colleagues from the sketch comedy show “Stella” and from “Wet Hot American Summer” in some offbeat cameos.

The absurd humor veers wildly from hilarious to inappropriate. The constant that keeps it all flowing is Deutch, who gives Gail improbably sunny disposition that masks how slyly funny the actor is. Deutch gives “Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass” the charisma get-out-of-jail free card this sometimes bonkers comedy needs.

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‘Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, July 10, in theaters. Rated R for sexual content, violence/bloody images and language. Running time: 93 minutes.

Review: 'Romería' is a tender and intense story of a young woman learning about the family she never knew, and finding her place among them.

Director Carla Simón’s “Romería” is much like the ocean where the main characters live — sunny and gorgeous on the surface, roiling and turbulent underneath.

Simón, who wrote the screenplay with her son, Neus Pipó Simón, tells a semi autobiographical story centering on 18-year-old Marina (played by Llúcia Garcia, in her first movie role). Marina is about to start college in Barcelona in 2004, but there’s an administrative hurdle she must clear first: She needs the family of her father, Alfonso, who died when she was little, to sign a notarized statement declaring that he’s her father.

Marina travels across Spain, from Barcelona on the Mediterranean to the Galicia area on the Atlantic, to meet Alfonso’s family. Her uncles and aunts are warm and generous, though a bit vague about certain memories of Alfonso. She spends most of her time hanging out with her teen cousins, who become the rambunctious siblings she never had. 

Meeting her grandparents (Marina Troncoso and José Ángel Egido) are a tougher nut to crack. Marina senses that there’s something about Fon, as her father is called, and her deceased mother that no one wants to talk about. 

One aunt drops a hint that Fon died in 1992, not in 1987, meaning she would have been old enough to meet and remember him. When her cousin, Suso (played by the single-named actor Mitch), lets slip that the family hid Fon away in his dying years, Marina’s uncle Iago (Alberto Garcia) reveals a hard truth: “It was common back then. … Everyone died behind closed doors.”

Simón uses a creative narrative device to let Marina learn the full story: She finds her mother’s lost diary, and visualizes her parents (played by Llúcia Garcia and Mitch) living together in a seaside tenement, in a life that starts romantic and ends tragically.

With Garcia’s heartbreaking and illuminating central performance, “Romerîa” becomes a tender and intense story of discovery — of a young woman encountering the family she never got to know, and finding herself and her place in that family in the process.

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‘Romería’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, July 10, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for sexuality, nudity, drug use and language. Running time: 112 minutes; in Spanish, with subtitles.

Review: 'Moana' delivers a live-action copy of the 2016 animated story that's too timid to go for anything deeper

Disney’s latest live-action remake of one of its animated movies, “Moana” has the same characters, the same music and the same sprightly pace of the 2016 original. What it lacks is a reason, other than to fill Disney’s coffers, to exist.

It’s only been 10 years since the animated “Moana” delivered us a new kind of Disney princess — a stubborn and resilient Pacific Islander teen who is called to the ocean and works to restore balance to nature and save her village. And less than two years since Disney brought that girl back in the animated “Moana 2,” as determined as ever to connect people across the sea.

So why go back to the original live-action “Moana” now? Because Disney has found that maintaining its intellectual property across platforms, from animation to live action to branding opportunities, makes the shareholders happy. And, as evidenced by last year’s ho-hum live-action remake of “Lilo & Stitch,” the audience will go along with the money grab if it means they can keep their kids entertained for 90 minutes.

Providing a synopsis of the new “Moana” is almost unnecessary, because it’s almost beat-for-beat the same as the original. Teen Moana (voiced by newcomer Catherine Laga’aia) is drawn to the ocean, even though her father, Chief Tui (John Tai), warns her that no one on their island has ever gone past the reef. But when the coconut trees are hit by blight and the village fishermen return with empty nets, Moana senses that the solution lies out in the far-off ocean.

With a nudge from her grandma (played by the great Maori star Rena Owen), Moana learns that her people weren’t always stuck on land, but were great voyagers on the ocean. So she heads out determined to save her village by finding a magical stone and reuniting it with the island goddess Tefiti. To do that, she must enlist the demigod who first stole the stone, Maui — who’s played by the same actor who voiced the character 10 years ago: Dwayne Johnson.

This casting may be the central flaw with this version of “Moana.” As a cartoon, Maui was a perfect comic creation, an eight-foot slab of pumped-up muscles who dwarfs the very human Moana — and Johnson’s voice, particularly singing “You’re Welcome,” a Lin-Manuel Miranda-written song that makes the most of his limited vocal range, remains a delight. But the very human Johnson doesn’t look that much like a demigod (even if he is 6-foot-5 next to Laga’aia’s 5-foot-2 frame).

Director Thomas Kail, best known for staging Miranda’s “Hamilton” (and directing the live-to-tape version on Disney+), colors safely within the prescribed Disney lines, never getting too far away from the imagery or characters the 2016 version burned into our collective brains. It’s an odd irony that in a movie about a young woman finding the courage to go beyond the reef, this “Moana” never gets out of the shallow end of the pool.

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‘Moana’

★★

Opens Friday, July 10, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for action/peril, some scary images, rude humor and brief thematic elements. Running time: 115 minutes.

Review: 'Minions & Monsters' run the little yellow creatures through old Hollywood, and a wealth of chaotically energetic humor

It’s been 16 years since Illumination Entertainment debuted with the villain-turned-good comedy “Despicable Me,” and it’s been at least two movies since any entry in the franchise have been worth anyone other than shareholders to take notice.

It’s a nice surprise to say that “Minions & Monsters,” the seventh movie featuring the goggle-eyed pill-shaped comical creatures, is the best movie in the series since the first “Despicable Me.” That’s admittedly a low bar, but the new movie wins for leaning into the joyous anarchy of the little Minions, and the hilarious and loving riffs on Hollywood history.

Minions, we’re told by a perky Hollywood museum tour guide (voiced by Allison Janney, our narrator), are responsible for much of movie history. Well, two Minions — James and Henry — who find the regular life of their tribe, finding an evil boss to serve, isn’t as fun as telling stories. When the Minions accidentally crash a movie set, they are found by a desperate director, Max (voiced by Christoph Waltz), who discovers the little guys make good movie extras.

What follows are a series of energetic gags that show the Minions inserted into classic silent movie scenes, alongside the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton. Will the children in Illumination’s target audience recognize the references? Probably not, but it’s thrilling to think this will introduce them to some of the classic silent images.

The twist in the script — by Brian Lynch and Pierre Coffin, the movie’s director (and the voice of all the Minions) — comes with the advent of sound, because the Minions’ gibberish voices don’t fit in the talkies. James dreams of making an epic monster movie, and uses a spell book picked up earlier in the movie, summons a tiny Cthulhu-like creature, Goomi (voiced by Trey Parker), to help make it happen. 

From the midpoint to the end, “Minions & Monsters” remains just as frenetic as the first half, but not quite as funny. The jokes about old Hollywood make the Minions the comic legends the other movies in the franchise failed to convince us they were.

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‘Minions & Monsters’

★★★

Opens Wednesday, July 1, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for violence/action, language and rude/macabre behavior. Running time: 90 minutes.

Review: 'Supergirl' serves up DC Comics' cynical side, and gives Milly Alcock a chance to shine as Superman's jaded cousin

If you like your superheroes surly, then director Craig Gillespie’s “Supergirl” is right up your alley — though you may wish, as I did, for more for the young woman of steel to do in the second movie of James Gunn’s DC cinematic era.

What you may know about Supergirl — either from her 1959 comic book debut, the 1984 film with Helen Slater, Melissa Benoist’s portrayal on TV (2015 to 2021) or Sasha Calle’s too-brief appearance in “The Flash” (2023) — is that she’s Kara Zor-El, Superman’s cousin and the second survivor of the destruction of the planet Krypton. Unlike Superman, aka Kal-El, aka Clark Kent, Kara did some living before arriving on Earth. 

In this movie, those experiences — seen in flashbacks, with David Krumholtz (“Oppenheimer”) and Emily Beecham (“Little Women”) as her parents — have made Kara (Milly Alcock) more jaded about the universe. Clark, Kara says at one point, “sees the good in everyone, and I see the truth.”

Kara spends a lot of time off-world, usually looking for planets with red suns like Krypton — because on those planets, she can get drunk and not have superpowers. She rides around in a junker spacecraft that looks like an RV on the inside, with her sole companion her dog, Krypto, who stole Gunn’s “Superman” out from under David Corenswet in his blue tights.

Rookie screenwriter Ana Nogueira’s story starts with a brutal scavenger race, the Brigands, who terrorize a family in the middle of nowhere. The Brigands leave behind a teen girl, Ruthye (Eve Ridley), who vows to kill the group’s leader, Krem (Matthias Schoenaerts), for revenge. 

Ruthye’s father managed to destroy the Brigands’ ship before he was killed, so the group finds a new one to steal: Kara’s. When she puts up a fight, Krem hits Krypto with a poison dart — and a healer tells Kara, through Ruthye, that she has three days to find Krem to get the antidote. 

Kara searches for the Brigands, and Ruthye tags along, though the two disagree strongly on what will happen when they find Krem. Ruthye intends to kill him, while Kara needs him alive to get the antidote to save Krypto.

What follows are a series of fight scenes, some of them in dive bars that make the Mos Eisley cantina look like a Best Western. In one bar, Kara and Ruthye encounter Lobo (Jason Momoa), a bored immortal who works as a bounty hunter. Lobo is a DC Comics fan favorite, I’m told, and Momoa brings the same comical menace to the role that he did to “Fast X” and “A Minecraft Movie.”

Gillespie’s action sequences are serviceable, if overly reliant on CGI and whiplash-inducing camera moves, in a narrative that borrows a little too much from Gunn’s “Guardians of the Galaxy” movies. 

The best part of “Supergirl” is Kara herself, and the way Alcock finds the sweet spot between the goody-goody hero and the sulky, despondent survivor. Hopefully Gunn & Co. will bring her back in a movie that makes full use of her bad attitude.

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‘Supergirl’

★★★

Opens Friday, June 26, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for sequences of strong violence, action, language, and smoking. Running time: 107 minutes.

Review: 'Couture' tells of four women in the fashion world, but the stories don't form a satisfying whole

French filmmaker Alice Winocour cannot be accused of not filling her drama “Couture” with plenty of smart ideas about the fashion world and the women on whom everything in it depends. Corralling all of those ideas into a consistently engaging film narrative isn’t so easy, though.

Winocour sets her film in Paris fashion week, with the stories of four different women:

• Maxine Walker (Angelina Jolie), an American indie filmmaker hired by a fashion house to direct the short film that will open the label’s big show. Her work is interrupted by a worrying call from her doctor, and news that she has breast cancer.

• Ada (Anyier Anei), a model just arrived in Paris, whose unique look has prompted the fashion house to hire her to lead off the runway show — and star as a vampire in Maxine’s short film. She’s trying to figure out this strange business, while supporting her family back in a camp for South Sudan refugees.

• Angèle (Ella Rumpf), the makeup artist hired for the label’s show and Maxine’s film — and who also has dreams of turning her backstage experiences into a screenplay. (It’s no coincidence that Winocour makes Rumpf’s Angèle the narrator.)

• And Christine (Garance Marillier), a seamstress trusted with putting together the label’s signature dress, the one Ada will wear down the runway. 

Winocour connects these four women’s stories in some intriguing and visually arresting ways. My favorite came when Christine pins thin red ribbons around a mannequin as a guide, and later a doctor (Vincent Lindon) draws similar red lines with a marker on Maxine’s chest ahead of her MRI. But for every arresting image like that, there’s something trite and predictable — like Angèle’s narration, or Maxine’s romantic fling with her cinematographer (Louis Garrel). 

The attention to detail is also striking. Winocour convinced Chanel to let her film in their atelier (with the double-C logo carefully removed), bringing a sharp authenticity to the movie, particularly in Marillier’s scenes in the workroom.

I would have loved to have seen any of the four stories — especially Ada’s, and also Christine’s — lifted from this movie and explored in a separate film. With this four-in-one approach, “Couture” gives us an interesting tasting menu rather than a satisfying meal.

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‘Couture’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, June 26, in theaters; Rated R for language, some sexuality, nudity and brief bloody violence. Running time: 103 minutes; in English and in French with subtitles. 

Review: 'Lucky Strike' tries to deliver World War II action on a budget, with a wooden Scott Eastwood in a solo survival march

The World War II drama “Lucky Strike” has neither the budget to create the epic sweep of a “Saving Private Ryan” or the acting talent to make its attempt at a one-against-all combat thriller worth the time.

The story is in the Ardennes Forest of Belgium in December 1944, just as the German army is launching its last-ditch effort to stop the approaching Allied forces — a massive and deadly six-week push that became known as The Battle of the Bulge. Director Rod Davis Lurie (“The Contender,” “The Last Castle”), co-writing with Mark Frydman, concentrates on a U.S. Army unit of engineers, six men tasked with planting explosives to block a road that the German Panzer divisions need to advance.

Leading the unit is Capt. John Castle (played by Scott Eastwood), an efficient and personable commander. We don’t see much of his charm, though, because his men are gunned down as they’re finishing the placement of their explosives. Castle succeeds in setting off the explosives, but then faces another dilemma: Getting back to base, wounded and alone.

He gets on the unit’s portable radio, but the men on the other end cannot help, because they’re pinned down by enemy fire, as well. The voice on the radio tells Castle to start walking to a rendezvous site 27 kilometers away — and to guard his radio battery, which he’s told will be his lifeline.

What follows in Lurie and Frydman’s telling are a series of encounters, with a Belgian farm family, various SS soldiers, what’s left of a Black U.S. Army unit that was ambushed early in the story, and an American (Taylor John Smith) who’s separated from his unit. 

Filmed in Bulgaria, the movie is short of recognizable cast members — besides Eastwood, the only major players are Colin Hanks as a colonel who gives Castle’s unit their orders, and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor (“King Richard”), who appears in the movie’s framing device and whose role in the story is only revealed at the end.

Lurie rests everything on the strong back and jutting chin of Eastwood — and while the actor has a face that resembles that of his famous father, Clint Eastwood, he doesn’t have the same charisma or gravitas. Between his wooden performance and the production’s limited resources in making wartime carnage look convincing, “Lucky Strike” becomes a damp squib of a movie, never delivering the nail-biting action it promises.

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‘Lucky Strike’

★★

Opens Friday, June 26, in theaters. Rated R for violence, some grisly images, and language. Running time: 103 minutes.