Review: For a dinner party gone entertainingly wrong — or is it right? — accept ‘The Invite’

For a long time, the lifestyles and foibles of the modest bourgeoisie were a mainstay of art-house cinema, with urbane, upscale audiences happy to turn out to see versions of their own lives depicted on the screen. But more recently, as ideas about what middle age looks like have shifted, along with the changing demographics of viewers, these films have largely disappeared. Which is what makes the seriocomic “The Invite” feel both fresh and something of a throwback — a movie for those who worry about losing their edge.

Directed by Olivia Wilde, “The Invite” was a clear standout when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and now arrives in theaters as one of the best dramas of the year so far. It feels daring for how it wants to actually examine the emotional costs of contemporary grown-up life, bringing wincing laughs of recognition.

The film begins with married couple Angela and Joe, played by Wilde and Seth Rogen, checking back in at their home in San Francisco at the end of the day. He has been at the teaching job he resents and she has been frantically preparing for the dinner party she may not have told him about. Their daughter is away at a sleepover for the evening and it seems they no longer fully know how to relate to each other. As they bicker and jab, their quiet dissatisfaction with their lives stops being so quiet.

Angela has invited over their neighbors from the apartment upstairs, who they do not know well and who often have loud sex. That couple, Piña and Hawk, played by Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton, seems more assured, self-possessed and adventurous, the kind of people you can absent-mindedly invent stories about, assuming their lives are much cooler than your own.

Things go in ways both expected and unexpected, the two couples warily feeling each other out as they wait to spring their own private agendas. Over the course of the evening, things will be alternately tense, flirty, vulnerable and revelatory as surprisingly little food is eaten. (Other substances get ingested instead.)

An adaptation of Cesc Gay’s 2020 Spanish film “Sentimental,” the screenplay is credited to Rashida Jones and Will McCormack. In an unusual step, the script was further workshopped and developed with the cast during rehearsals. Rogen came up with some of the biggest laugh lines and Norton wrote the deeply earnest monologue he delivers late in the film. (The popular Belgian psychotherapist Esther Perel is also credited as a consultant.)

This American version expands upon the characters more than Gay’s original film while consistently returning to the disappointment of Angela and Joe’s lives in terms both big and small. Neither of them are the people they once thought they might become. Whether two people who are each unhappy can make it as a couple becomes the overriding theme of the film.

This is Wilde’s third movie as a director and it is, by far, her most cohesive and accomplished, both contained and expansive. Her debut, 2019’s charming end-of-high-school tale “Booksmart,” had a throw-everything-at-the-wall quality, as if she wanted to get out every idea and try every trick in case she never got another chance to direct. Wilde’s follow-up, the 2022 psychodrama “Don’t Worry Darling,” became mired in behind-the-scenes gossip and tabloid speculation that overshadowed what was intended as a stylized portrait of female rage and discontent.

Her latest fulfills and exceeds the promise of those earlier movies. Shot on 35mm film by cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra, the action of “The Invite” is almost entirely confined to Angela and Joe’s apartment, which thanks to a recent renovation has plenty of rooms to explore. All four players are exceptional in their roles, playing smartly off their screen personas while exploring the nuances of the characters and their intersecting dynamics.

Wilde’s Angela is expressive and antic; Rogen’s Joe is sullen and snarky. Cruz is alluring and watchful, while Norton turns out to be the film’s secret weapon. He has a low-key comic energy and helps guide the story through a few of its trickier emotional turns. At one point he simply rises from behind a couch and it plays like a punchline.

Skip the next two paragraphs if you want to hold onto the film’s purest pleasures. Those noises from upstairs have been Piña and Hawk hosting group sex parties and they are now cruising Angela and Joe for some extramarital couples’ fun. Here, the movie pivots from passive-aggressive party conversation into farce, as Angela and Joe try to process the idea anyone else might find them desirable, as they have long since given up on seeing themselves in that way.

Wilde in particular lights up during this section, Angela’s mind racing at possibilities she never considered for herself while fumbling over the practicalities of protocols and just how this would work. Before pushing the film into its final forlorn section, the excitement that something sexy might happen charges the actors. It is very likely that streams of Sade’s seductive “By Your Side” will skyrocket.

But the focus stays very much on the struggles of married life. One of the biggest strengths of “The Invite” is the way it keeps evolving as the night progresses so it never feels claustrophobic or repetitive. There is a sense of visual invention and imagination to the film that continues all the way through, such as a moment when Wilde crouches down to check on a doomed soufflé in the oven and addresses the camera directly, looking up as if talking to Rogen. The viewer is frequently placed in an adjacent POV to the different characters, as if you are there in the room too.

The film has a propulsive rhythm to it, a relentlessness, even as Wilde and editors Yorgos Mavropsaridis and Anthony Boys know when to ease off the throttle and take it easy for a bit. The film breathes in a dynamic way, the last few beats taking a startling turn toward a somber wistfulness. The ending is just enigmatic enough to have audiences talking it through as they make their way out of the theater.

The end credits include a handwritten dedication, “For Diane,” a nod to Diane Keaton. The live-wire wit and idiosyncratic verve that she embodied in “Reds” and “Something’s Gotta Give” are very much on display here. Early in the story, Norton dryly notes, “We love a contentious environment.” Thanks to Wilde’s confident direction and the ensemble’s unpredictable performances, audiences will too.

For a long time, the lifestyles and foibles of the modest bourgeoisie were a mainstay of art-house cinema, with urbane, upscale audiences happy to turn out to see versions of their own lives depicted on the screen. But more recently, as ideas about what middle age looks like have shifted, along with the changing demographics of viewers, these films have largely disappeared. Which is what makes the seriocomic “The Invite” feel both fresh and something of a throwback — a movie for those who worry about losing their edge.

Directed by Olivia Wilde, “The Invite” was a clear standout when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and now arrives in theaters as one of the best dramas of the year so far. It feels daring for how it wants to actually examine the emotional costs of contemporary grown-up life, bringing wincing laughs of recognition.

The film begins with married couple Angela and Joe, played by Wilde and Seth Rogen, checking back in at their home in San Francisco at the end of the day. He has been at the teaching job he resents and she has been frantically preparing for the dinner party she may not have told him about. Their daughter is away at a sleepover for the evening and it seems they no longer fully know how to relate to each other. As they bicker and jab, their quiet dissatisfaction with their lives stops being so quiet.

Angela has invited over their neighbors from the apartment upstairs, who they do not know well and who often have loud sex. That couple, Piña and Hawk, played by Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton, seems more assured, self-possessed and adventurous, the kind of people you can absent-mindedly invent stories about, assuming their lives are much cooler than your own.

Things go in ways both expected and unexpected, the two couples warily feeling each other out as they wait to spring their own private agendas. Over the course of the evening, things will be alternately tense, flirty, vulnerable and revelatory as surprisingly little food is eaten. (Other substances get ingested instead.)

An adaptation of Cesc Gay’s 2020 Spanish film “Sentimental,” the screenplay is credited to Rashida Jones and Will McCormack. In an unusual step, the script was further workshopped and developed with the cast during rehearsals. Rogen came up with some of the biggest laugh lines and Norton wrote the deeply earnest monologue he delivers late in the film. (The popular Belgian psychotherapist Esther Perel is also credited as a consultant.)

This American version expands upon the characters more than Gay’s original film while consistently returning to the disappointment of Angela and Joe’s lives in terms both big and small. Neither of them are the people they once thought they might become. Whether two people who are each unhappy can make it as a couple becomes the overriding theme of the film.

This is Wilde’s third movie as a director and it is, by far, her most cohesive and accomplished, both contained and expansive. Her debut, 2019’s charming end-of-high-school tale “Booksmart,” had a throw-everything-at-the-wall quality, as if she wanted to get out every idea and try every trick in case she never got another chance to direct. Wilde’s follow-up, the 2022 psychodrama “Don’t Worry Darling,” became mired in behind-the-scenes gossip and tabloid speculation that overshadowed what was intended as a stylized portrait of female rage and discontent.

Her latest fulfills and exceeds the promise of those earlier movies. Shot on 35mm film by cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra, the action of “The Invite” is almost entirely confined to Angela and Joe’s apartment, which thanks to a recent renovation has plenty of rooms to explore. All four players are exceptional in their roles, playing smartly off their screen personas while exploring the nuances of the characters and their intersecting dynamics.

Wilde’s Angela is expressive and antic; Rogen’s Joe is sullen and snarky. Cruz is alluring and watchful, while Norton turns out to be the film’s secret weapon. He has a low-key comic energy and helps guide the story through a few of its trickier emotional turns. At one point he simply rises from behind a couch and it plays like a punchline.

Skip the next two paragraphs if you want to hold onto the film’s purest pleasures. Those noises from upstairs have been Piña and Hawk hosting group sex parties and they are now cruising Angela and Joe for some extramarital couples’ fun. Here, the movie pivots from passive-aggressive party conversation into farce, as Angela and Joe try to process the idea anyone else might find them desirable, as they have long since given up on seeing themselves in that way.

Wilde in particular lights up during this section, Angela’s mind racing at possibilities she never considered for herself while fumbling over the practicalities of protocols and just how this would work. Before pushing the film into its final forlorn section, the excitement that something sexy might happen charges the actors. It is very likely that streams of Sade’s seductive “By Your Side” will skyrocket.

But the focus stays very much on the struggles of married life. One of the biggest strengths of “The Invite” is the way it keeps evolving as the night progresses so it never feels claustrophobic or repetitive. There is a sense of visual invention and imagination to the film that continues all the way through, such as a moment when Wilde crouches down to check on a doomed soufflé in the oven and addresses the camera directly, looking up as if talking to Rogen. The viewer is frequently placed in an adjacent POV to the different characters, as if you are there in the room too.

The film has a propulsive rhythm to it, a relentlessness, even as Wilde and editors Yorgos Mavropsaridis and Anthony Boys know when to ease off the throttle and take it easy for a bit. The film breathes in a dynamic way, the last few beats taking a startling turn toward a somber wistfulness. The ending is just enigmatic enough to have audiences talking it through as they make their way out of the theater.

The end credits include a handwritten dedication, “For Diane,” a nod to Diane Keaton. The live-wire wit and idiosyncratic verve that she embodied in “Reds” and “Something’s Gotta Give” are very much on display here. Early in the story, Norton dryly notes, “We love a contentious environment.” Thanks to Wilde’s confident direction and the ensemble’s unpredictable performances, audiences will too.

For a long time, the lifestyles and foibles of the modest bourgeoisie were a mainstay of art-house cinema, with urbane, upscale audiences happy to turn out to see versions of their own lives depicted on the screen. But more recently, as ideas about what middle age looks like have shifted, along with the changing demographics of viewers, these films have largely disappeared. Which is what makes the seriocomic “The Invite” feel both fresh and something of a throwback — a movie for those who worry about losing their edge.

Directed by Olivia Wilde, “The Invite” was a clear standout when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and now arrives in theaters as one of the best dramas of the year so far. It feels daring for how it wants to actually examine the emotional costs of contemporary grown-up life, bringing wincing laughs of recognition.

The film begins with married couple Angela and Joe, played by Wilde and Seth Rogen, checking back in at their home in San Francisco at the end of the day. He has been at the teaching job he resents and she has been frantically preparing for the dinner party she may not have told him about. Their daughter is away at a sleepover for the evening and it seems they no longer fully know how to relate to each other. As they bicker and jab, their quiet dissatisfaction with their lives stops being so quiet.

Angela has invited over their neighbors from the apartment upstairs, who they do not know well and who often have loud sex. That couple, Piña and Hawk, played by Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton, seems more assured, self-possessed and adventurous, the kind of people you can absent-mindedly invent stories about, assuming their lives are much cooler than your own.

Things go in ways both expected and unexpected, the two couples warily feeling each other out as they wait to spring their own private agendas. Over the course of the evening, things will be alternately tense, flirty, vulnerable and revelatory as surprisingly little food is eaten. (Other substances get ingested instead.)

An adaptation of Cesc Gay’s 2020 Spanish film “Sentimental,” the screenplay is credited to Rashida Jones and Will McCormack. In an unusual step, the script was further workshopped and developed with the cast during rehearsals. Rogen came up with some of the biggest laugh lines and Norton wrote the deeply earnest monologue he delivers late in the film. (The popular Belgian psychotherapist Esther Perel is also credited as a consultant.)

This American version expands upon the characters more than Gay’s original film while consistently returning to the disappointment of Angela and Joe’s lives in terms both big and small. Neither of them are the people they once thought they might become. Whether two people who are each unhappy can make it as a couple becomes the overriding theme of the film.

This is Wilde’s third movie as a director and it is, by far, her most cohesive and accomplished, both contained and expansive. Her debut, 2019’s charming end-of-high-school tale “Booksmart,” had a throw-everything-at-the-wall quality, as if she wanted to get out every idea and try every trick in case she never got another chance to direct. Wilde’s follow-up, the 2022 psychodrama “Don’t Worry Darling,” became mired in behind-the-scenes gossip and tabloid speculation that overshadowed what was intended as a stylized portrait of female rage and discontent.

Her latest fulfills and exceeds the promise of those earlier movies. Shot on 35mm film by cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra, the action of “The Invite” is almost entirely confined to Angela and Joe’s apartment, which thanks to a recent renovation has plenty of rooms to explore. All four players are exceptional in their roles, playing smartly off their screen personas while exploring the nuances of the characters and their intersecting dynamics.

Wilde’s Angela is expressive and antic; Rogen’s Joe is sullen and snarky. Cruz is alluring and watchful, while Norton turns out to be the film’s secret weapon. He has a low-key comic energy and helps guide the story through a few of its trickier emotional turns. At one point he simply rises from behind a couch and it plays like a punchline.

Skip the next two paragraphs if you want to hold onto the film’s purest pleasures. Those noises from upstairs have been Piña and Hawk hosting group sex parties and they are now cruising Angela and Joe for some extramarital couples’ fun. Here, the movie pivots from passive-aggressive party conversation into farce, as Angela and Joe try to process the idea anyone else might find them desirable, as they have long since given up on seeing themselves in that way.

Wilde in particular lights up during this section, Angela’s mind racing at possibilities she never considered for herself while fumbling over the practicalities of protocols and just how this would work. Before pushing the film into its final forlorn section, the excitement that something sexy might happen charges the actors. It is very likely that streams of Sade’s seductive “By Your Side” will skyrocket.

But the focus stays very much on the struggles of married life. One of the biggest strengths of “The Invite” is the way it keeps evolving as the night progresses so it never feels claustrophobic or repetitive. There is a sense of visual invention and imagination to the film that continues all the way through, such as a moment when Wilde crouches down to check on a doomed soufflé in the oven and addresses the camera directly, looking up as if talking to Rogen. The viewer is frequently placed in an adjacent POV to the different characters, as if you are there in the room too.

The film has a propulsive rhythm to it, a relentlessness, even as Wilde and editors Yorgos Mavropsaridis and Anthony Boys know when to ease off the throttle and take it easy for a bit. The film breathes in a dynamic way, the last few beats taking a startling turn toward a somber wistfulness. The ending is just enigmatic enough to have audiences talking it through as they make their way out of the theater.

The end credits include a handwritten dedication, “For Diane,” a nod to Diane Keaton. The live-wire wit and idiosyncratic verve that she embodied in “Reds” and “Something’s Gotta Give” are very much on display here. Early in the story, Norton dryly notes, “We love a contentious environment.” Thanks to Wilde’s confident direction and the ensemble’s unpredictable performances, audiences will too.

For a long time, the lifestyles and foibles of the modest bourgeoisie were a mainstay of art-house cinema, with urbane, upscale audiences happy to turn out to see versions of their own lives depicted on the screen. But more recently, as ideas about what middle age looks like have shifted, along with the changing demographics of viewers, these films have largely disappeared. Which is what makes the seriocomic “The Invite” feel both fresh and something of a throwback — a movie for those who worry about losing their edge.

Directed by Olivia Wilde, “The Invite” was a clear standout when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and now arrives in theaters as one of the best dramas of the year so far. It feels daring for how it wants to actually examine the emotional costs of contemporary grown-up life, bringing wincing laughs of recognition.

The film begins with married couple Angela and Joe, played by Wilde and Seth Rogen, checking back in at their home in San Francisco at the end of the day. He has been at the teaching job he resents and she has been frantically preparing for the dinner party she may not have told him about. Their daughter is away at a sleepover for the evening and it seems they no longer fully know how to relate to each other. As they bicker and jab, their quiet dissatisfaction with their lives stops being so quiet.

Angela has invited over their neighbors from the apartment upstairs, who they do not know well and who often have loud sex. That couple, Piña and Hawk, played by Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton, seems more assured, self-possessed and adventurous, the kind of people you can absent-mindedly invent stories about, assuming their lives are much cooler than your own.

Things go in ways both expected and unexpected, the two couples warily feeling each other out as they wait to spring their own private agendas. Over the course of the evening, things will be alternately tense, flirty, vulnerable and revelatory as surprisingly little food is eaten. (Other substances get ingested instead.)

An adaptation of Cesc Gay’s 2020 Spanish film “Sentimental,” the screenplay is credited to Rashida Jones and Will McCormack. In an unusual step, the script was further workshopped and developed with the cast during rehearsals. Rogen came up with some of the biggest laugh lines and Norton wrote the deeply earnest monologue he delivers late in the film. (The popular Belgian psychotherapist Esther Perel is also credited as a consultant.)

This American version expands upon the characters more than Gay’s original film while consistently returning to the disappointment of Angela and Joe’s lives in terms both big and small. Neither of them are the people they once thought they might become. Whether two people who are each unhappy can make it as a couple becomes the overriding theme of the film.

This is Wilde’s third movie as a director and it is, by far, her most cohesive and accomplished, both contained and expansive. Her debut, 2019’s charming end-of-high-school tale “Booksmart,” had a throw-everything-at-the-wall quality, as if she wanted to get out every idea and try every trick in case she never got another chance to direct. Wilde’s follow-up, the 2022 psychodrama “Don’t Worry Darling,” became mired in behind-the-scenes gossip and tabloid speculation that overshadowed what was intended as a stylized portrait of female rage and discontent.

Her latest fulfills and exceeds the promise of those earlier movies. Shot on 35mm film by cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra, the action of “The Invite” is almost entirely confined to Angela and Joe’s apartment, which thanks to a recent renovation has plenty of rooms to explore. All four players are exceptional in their roles, playing smartly off their screen personas while exploring the nuances of the characters and their intersecting dynamics.

Wilde’s Angela is expressive and antic; Rogen’s Joe is sullen and snarky. Cruz is alluring and watchful, while Norton turns out to be the film’s secret weapon. He has a low-key comic energy and helps guide the story through a few of its trickier emotional turns. At one point he simply rises from behind a couch and it plays like a punchline.

Skip the next two paragraphs if you want to hold onto the film’s purest pleasures. Those noises from upstairs have been Piña and Hawk hosting group sex parties and they are now cruising Angela and Joe for some extramarital couples’ fun. Here, the movie pivots from passive-aggressive party conversation into farce, as Angela and Joe try to process the idea anyone else might find them desirable, as they have long since given up on seeing themselves in that way.

Wilde in particular lights up during this section, Angela’s mind racing at possibilities she never considered for herself while fumbling over the practicalities of protocols and just how this would work. Before pushing the film into its final forlorn section, the excitement that something sexy might happen charges the actors. It is very likely that streams of Sade’s seductive “By Your Side” will skyrocket.

But the focus stays very much on the struggles of married life. One of the biggest strengths of “The Invite” is the way it keeps evolving as the night progresses so it never feels claustrophobic or repetitive. There is a sense of visual invention and imagination to the film that continues all the way through, such as a moment when Wilde crouches down to check on a doomed soufflé in the oven and addresses the camera directly, looking up as if talking to Rogen. The viewer is frequently placed in an adjacent POV to the different characters, as if you are there in the room too.

The film has a propulsive rhythm to it, a relentlessness, even as Wilde and editors Yorgos Mavropsaridis and Anthony Boys know when to ease off the throttle and take it easy for a bit. The film breathes in a dynamic way, the last few beats taking a startling turn toward a somber wistfulness. The ending is just enigmatic enough to have audiences talking it through as they make their way out of the theater.

The end credits include a handwritten dedication, “For Diane,” a nod to Diane Keaton. The live-wire wit and idiosyncratic verve that she embodied in “Reds” and “Something’s Gotta Give” are very much on display here. Early in the story, Norton dryly notes, “We love a contentious environment.” Thanks to Wilde’s confident direction and the ensemble’s unpredictable performances, audiences will too.

For a long time, the lifestyles and foibles of the modest bourgeoisie were a mainstay of art-house cinema, with urbane, upscale audiences happy to turn out to see versions of their own lives depicted on the screen. But more recently, as ideas about what middle age looks like have shifted, along with the changing demographics of viewers, these films have largely disappeared. Which is what makes the seriocomic “The Invite” feel both fresh and something of a throwback — a movie for those who worry about losing their edge.

Directed by Olivia Wilde, “The Invite” was a clear standout when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and now arrives in theaters as one of the best dramas of the year so far. It feels daring for how it wants to actually examine the emotional costs of contemporary grown-up life, bringing wincing laughs of recognition.

The film begins with married couple Angela and Joe, played by Wilde and Seth Rogen, checking back in at their home in San Francisco at the end of the day. He has been at the teaching job he resents and she has been frantically preparing for the dinner party she may not have told him about. Their daughter is away at a sleepover for the evening and it seems they no longer fully know how to relate to each other. As they bicker and jab, their quiet dissatisfaction with their lives stops being so quiet.

Angela has invited over their neighbors from the apartment upstairs, who they do not know well and who often have loud sex. That couple, Piña and Hawk, played by Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton, seems more assured, self-possessed and adventurous, the kind of people you can absent-mindedly invent stories about, assuming their lives are much cooler than your own.

Things go in ways both expected and unexpected, the two couples warily feeling each other out as they wait to spring their own private agendas. Over the course of the evening, things will be alternately tense, flirty, vulnerable and revelatory as surprisingly little food is eaten. (Other substances get ingested instead.)

An adaptation of Cesc Gay’s 2020 Spanish film “Sentimental,” the screenplay is credited to Rashida Jones and Will McCormack. In an unusual step, the script was further workshopped and developed with the cast during rehearsals. Rogen came up with some of the biggest laugh lines and Norton wrote the deeply earnest monologue he delivers late in the film. (The popular Belgian psychotherapist Esther Perel is also credited as a consultant.)

This American version expands upon the characters more than Gay’s original film while consistently returning to the disappointment of Angela and Joe’s lives in terms both big and small. Neither of them are the people they once thought they might become. Whether two people who are each unhappy can make it as a couple becomes the overriding theme of the film.

This is Wilde’s third movie as a director and it is, by far, her most cohesive and accomplished, both contained and expansive. Her debut, 2019’s charming end-of-high-school tale “Booksmart,” had a throw-everything-at-the-wall quality, as if she wanted to get out every idea and try every trick in case she never got another chance to direct. Wilde’s follow-up, the 2022 psychodrama “Don’t Worry Darling,” became mired in behind-the-scenes gossip and tabloid speculation that overshadowed what was intended as a stylized portrait of female rage and discontent.

Her latest fulfills and exceeds the promise of those earlier movies. Shot on 35mm film by cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra, the action of “The Invite” is almost entirely confined to Angela and Joe’s apartment, which thanks to a recent renovation has plenty of rooms to explore. All four players are exceptional in their roles, playing smartly off their screen personas while exploring the nuances of the characters and their intersecting dynamics.

Wilde’s Angela is expressive and antic; Rogen’s Joe is sullen and snarky. Cruz is alluring and watchful, while Norton turns out to be the film’s secret weapon. He has a low-key comic energy and helps guide the story through a few of its trickier emotional turns. At one point he simply rises from behind a couch and it plays like a punchline.

Skip the next two paragraphs if you want to hold onto the film’s purest pleasures. Those noises from upstairs have been Piña and Hawk hosting group sex parties and they are now cruising Angela and Joe for some extramarital couples’ fun. Here, the movie pivots from passive-aggressive party conversation into farce, as Angela and Joe try to process the idea anyone else might find them desirable, as they have long since given up on seeing themselves in that way.

Wilde in particular lights up during this section, Angela’s mind racing at possibilities she never considered for herself while fumbling over the practicalities of protocols and just how this would work. Before pushing the film into its final forlorn section, the excitement that something sexy might happen charges the actors. It is very likely that streams of Sade’s seductive “By Your Side” will skyrocket.

But the focus stays very much on the struggles of married life. One of the biggest strengths of “The Invite” is the way it keeps evolving as the night progresses so it never feels claustrophobic or repetitive. There is a sense of visual invention and imagination to the film that continues all the way through, such as a moment when Wilde crouches down to check on a doomed soufflé in the oven and addresses the camera directly, looking up as if talking to Rogen. The viewer is frequently placed in an adjacent POV to the different characters, as if you are there in the room too.

The film has a propulsive rhythm to it, a relentlessness, even as Wilde and editors Yorgos Mavropsaridis and Anthony Boys know when to ease off the throttle and take it easy for a bit. The film breathes in a dynamic way, the last few beats taking a startling turn toward a somber wistfulness. The ending is just enigmatic enough to have audiences talking it through as they make their way out of the theater.

The end credits include a handwritten dedication, “For Diane,” a nod to Diane Keaton. The live-wire wit and idiosyncratic verve that she embodied in “Reds” and “Something’s Gotta Give” are very much on display here. Early in the story, Norton dryly notes, “We love a contentious environment.” Thanks to Wilde’s confident direction and the ensemble’s unpredictable performances, audiences will too.

For a long time, the lifestyles and foibles of the modest bourgeoisie were a mainstay of art-house cinema, with urbane, upscale audiences happy to turn out to see versions of their own lives depicted on the screen. But more recently, as ideas about what middle age looks like have shifted, along with the changing demographics of viewers, these films have largely disappeared. Which is what makes the seriocomic “The Invite” feel both fresh and something of a throwback — a movie for those who worry about losing their edge.

Directed by Olivia Wilde, “The Invite” was a clear standout when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and now arrives in theaters as one of the best dramas of the year so far. It feels daring for how it wants to actually examine the emotional costs of contemporary grown-up life, bringing wincing laughs of recognition.

The film begins with married couple Angela and Joe, played by Wilde and Seth Rogen, checking back in at their home in San Francisco at the end of the day. He has been at the teaching job he resents and she has been frantically preparing for the dinner party she may not have told him about. Their daughter is away at a sleepover for the evening and it seems they no longer fully know how to relate to each other. As they bicker and jab, their quiet dissatisfaction with their lives stops being so quiet.

Angela has invited over their neighbors from the apartment upstairs, who they do not know well and who often have loud sex. That couple, Piña and Hawk, played by Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton, seems more assured, self-possessed and adventurous, the kind of people you can absent-mindedly invent stories about, assuming their lives are much cooler than your own.

Things go in ways both expected and unexpected, the two couples warily feeling each other out as they wait to spring their own private agendas. Over the course of the evening, things will be alternately tense, flirty, vulnerable and revelatory as surprisingly little food is eaten. (Other substances get ingested instead.)

An adaptation of Cesc Gay’s 2020 Spanish film “Sentimental,” the screenplay is credited to Rashida Jones and Will McCormack. In an unusual step, the script was further workshopped and developed with the cast during rehearsals. Rogen came up with some of the biggest laugh lines and Norton wrote the deeply earnest monologue he delivers late in the film. (The popular Belgian psychotherapist Esther Perel is also credited as a consultant.)

This American version expands upon the characters more than Gay’s original film while consistently returning to the disappointment of Angela and Joe’s lives in terms both big and small. Neither of them are the people they once thought they might become. Whether two people who are each unhappy can make it as a couple becomes the overriding theme of the film.

This is Wilde’s third movie as a director and it is, by far, her most cohesive and accomplished, both contained and expansive. Her debut, 2019’s charming end-of-high-school tale “Booksmart,” had a throw-everything-at-the-wall quality, as if she wanted to get out every idea and try every trick in case she never got another chance to direct. Wilde’s follow-up, the 2022 psychodrama “Don’t Worry Darling,” became mired in behind-the-scenes gossip and tabloid speculation that overshadowed what was intended as a stylized portrait of female rage and discontent.

Her latest fulfills and exceeds the promise of those earlier movies. Shot on 35mm film by cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra, the action of “The Invite” is almost entirely confined to Angela and Joe’s apartment, which thanks to a recent renovation has plenty of rooms to explore. All four players are exceptional in their roles, playing smartly off their screen personas while exploring the nuances of the characters and their intersecting dynamics.

Wilde’s Angela is expressive and antic; Rogen’s Joe is sullen and snarky. Cruz is alluring and watchful, while Norton turns out to be the film’s secret weapon. He has a low-key comic energy and helps guide the story through a few of its trickier emotional turns. At one point he simply rises from behind a couch and it plays like a punchline.

Skip the next two paragraphs if you want to hold onto the film’s purest pleasures. Those noises from upstairs have been Piña and Hawk hosting group sex parties and they are now cruising Angela and Joe for some extramarital couples’ fun. Here, the movie pivots from passive-aggressive party conversation into farce, as Angela and Joe try to process the idea anyone else might find them desirable, as they have long since given up on seeing themselves in that way.

Wilde in particular lights up during this section, Angela’s mind racing at possibilities she never considered for herself while fumbling over the practicalities of protocols and just how this would work. Before pushing the film into its final forlorn section, the excitement that something sexy might happen charges the actors. It is very likely that streams of Sade’s seductive “By Your Side” will skyrocket.

But the focus stays very much on the struggles of married life. One of the biggest strengths of “The Invite” is the way it keeps evolving as the night progresses so it never feels claustrophobic or repetitive. There is a sense of visual invention and imagination to the film that continues all the way through, such as a moment when Wilde crouches down to check on a doomed soufflé in the oven and addresses the camera directly, looking up as if talking to Rogen. The viewer is frequently placed in an adjacent POV to the different characters, as if you are there in the room too.

The film has a propulsive rhythm to it, a relentlessness, even as Wilde and editors Yorgos Mavropsaridis and Anthony Boys know when to ease off the throttle and take it easy for a bit. The film breathes in a dynamic way, the last few beats taking a startling turn toward a somber wistfulness. The ending is just enigmatic enough to have audiences talking it through as they make their way out of the theater.

The end credits include a handwritten dedication, “For Diane,” a nod to Diane Keaton. The live-wire wit and idiosyncratic verve that she embodied in “Reds” and “Something’s Gotta Give” are very much on display here. Early in the story, Norton dryly notes, “We love a contentious environment.” Thanks to Wilde’s confident direction and the ensemble’s unpredictable performances, audiences will too.

For a long time, the lifestyles and foibles of the modest bourgeoisie were a mainstay of art-house cinema, with urbane, upscale audiences happy to turn out to see versions of their own lives depicted on the screen. But more recently, as ideas about what middle age looks like have shifted, along with the changing demographics of viewers, these films have largely disappeared. Which is what makes the seriocomic “The Invite” feel both fresh and something of a throwback — a movie for those who worry about losing their edge.

Directed by Olivia Wilde, “The Invite” was a clear standout when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and now arrives in theaters as one of the best dramas of the year so far. It feels daring for how it wants to actually examine the emotional costs of contemporary grown-up life, bringing wincing laughs of recognition.

The film begins with married couple Angela and Joe, played by Wilde and Seth Rogen, checking back in at their home in San Francisco at the end of the day. He has been at the teaching job he resents and she has been frantically preparing for the dinner party she may not have told him about. Their daughter is away at a sleepover for the evening and it seems they no longer fully know how to relate to each other. As they bicker and jab, their quiet dissatisfaction with their lives stops being so quiet.

Angela has invited over their neighbors from the apartment upstairs, who they do not know well and who often have loud sex. That couple, Piña and Hawk, played by Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton, seems more assured, self-possessed and adventurous, the kind of people you can absent-mindedly invent stories about, assuming their lives are much cooler than your own.

Things go in ways both expected and unexpected, the two couples warily feeling each other out as they wait to spring their own private agendas. Over the course of the evening, things will be alternately tense, flirty, vulnerable and revelatory as surprisingly little food is eaten. (Other substances get ingested instead.)

An adaptation of Cesc Gay’s 2020 Spanish film “Sentimental,” the screenplay is credited to Rashida Jones and Will McCormack. In an unusual step, the script was further workshopped and developed with the cast during rehearsals. Rogen came up with some of the biggest laugh lines and Norton wrote the deeply earnest monologue he delivers late in the film. (The popular Belgian psychotherapist Esther Perel is also credited as a consultant.)

This American version expands upon the characters more than Gay’s original film while consistently returning to the disappointment of Angela and Joe’s lives in terms both big and small. Neither of them are the people they once thought they might become. Whether two people who are each unhappy can make it as a couple becomes the overriding theme of the film.

This is Wilde’s third movie as a director and it is, by far, her most cohesive and accomplished, both contained and expansive. Her debut, 2019’s charming end-of-high-school tale “Booksmart,” had a throw-everything-at-the-wall quality, as if she wanted to get out every idea and try every trick in case she never got another chance to direct. Wilde’s follow-up, the 2022 psychodrama “Don’t Worry Darling,” became mired in behind-the-scenes gossip and tabloid speculation that overshadowed what was intended as a stylized portrait of female rage and discontent.

Her latest fulfills and exceeds the promise of those earlier movies. Shot on 35mm film by cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra, the action of “The Invite” is almost entirely confined to Angela and Joe’s apartment, which thanks to a recent renovation has plenty of rooms to explore. All four players are exceptional in their roles, playing smartly off their screen personas while exploring the nuances of the characters and their intersecting dynamics.

Wilde’s Angela is expressive and antic; Rogen’s Joe is sullen and snarky. Cruz is alluring and watchful, while Norton turns out to be the film’s secret weapon. He has a low-key comic energy and helps guide the story through a few of its trickier emotional turns. At one point he simply rises from behind a couch and it plays like a punchline.

Skip the next two paragraphs if you want to hold onto the film’s purest pleasures. Those noises from upstairs have been Piña and Hawk hosting group sex parties and they are now cruising Angela and Joe for some extramarital couples’ fun. Here, the movie pivots from passive-aggressive party conversation into farce, as Angela and Joe try to process the idea anyone else might find them desirable, as they have long since given up on seeing themselves in that way.

Wilde in particular lights up during this section, Angela’s mind racing at possibilities she never considered for herself while fumbling over the practicalities of protocols and just how this would work. Before pushing the film into its final forlorn section, the excitement that something sexy might happen charges the actors. It is very likely that streams of Sade’s seductive “By Your Side” will skyrocket.

But the focus stays very much on the struggles of married life. One of the biggest strengths of “The Invite” is the way it keeps evolving as the night progresses so it never feels claustrophobic or repetitive. There is a sense of visual invention and imagination to the film that continues all the way through, such as a moment when Wilde crouches down to check on a doomed soufflé in the oven and addresses the camera directly, looking up as if talking to Rogen. The viewer is frequently placed in an adjacent POV to the different characters, as if you are there in the room too.

The film has a propulsive rhythm to it, a relentlessness, even as Wilde and editors Yorgos Mavropsaridis and Anthony Boys know when to ease off the throttle and take it easy for a bit. The film breathes in a dynamic way, the last few beats taking a startling turn toward a somber wistfulness. The ending is just enigmatic enough to have audiences talking it through as they make their way out of the theater.

The end credits include a handwritten dedication, “For Diane,” a nod to Diane Keaton. The live-wire wit and idiosyncratic verve that she embodied in “Reds” and “Something’s Gotta Give” are very much on display here. Early in the story, Norton dryly notes, “We love a contentious environment.” Thanks to Wilde’s confident direction and the ensemble’s unpredictable performances, audiences will too.

For a long time, the lifestyles and foibles of the modest bourgeoisie were a mainstay of art-house cinema, with urbane, upscale audiences happy to turn out to see versions of their own lives depicted on the screen. But more recently, as ideas about what middle age looks like have shifted, along with the changing demographics of viewers, these films have largely disappeared. Which is what makes the seriocomic “The Invite” feel both fresh and something of a throwback — a movie for those who worry about losing their edge.

Directed by Olivia Wilde, “The Invite” was a clear standout when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and now arrives in theaters as one of the best dramas of the year so far. It feels daring for how it wants to actually examine the emotional costs of contemporary grown-up life, bringing wincing laughs of recognition.

The film begins with married couple Angela and Joe, played by Wilde and Seth Rogen, checking back in at their home in San Francisco at the end of the day. He has been at the teaching job he resents and she has been frantically preparing for the dinner party she may not have told him about. Their daughter is away at a sleepover for the evening and it seems they no longer fully know how to relate to each other. As they bicker and jab, their quiet dissatisfaction with their lives stops being so quiet.

Angela has invited over their neighbors from the apartment upstairs, who they do not know well and who often have loud sex. That couple, Piña and Hawk, played by Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton, seems more assured, self-possessed and adventurous, the kind of people you can absent-mindedly invent stories about, assuming their lives are much cooler than your own.

Things go in ways both expected and unexpected, the two couples warily feeling each other out as they wait to spring their own private agendas. Over the course of the evening, things will be alternately tense, flirty, vulnerable and revelatory as surprisingly little food is eaten. (Other substances get ingested instead.)

An adaptation of Cesc Gay’s 2020 Spanish film “Sentimental,” the screenplay is credited to Rashida Jones and Will McCormack. In an unusual step, the script was further workshopped and developed with the cast during rehearsals. Rogen came up with some of the biggest laugh lines and Norton wrote the deeply earnest monologue he delivers late in the film. (The popular Belgian psychotherapist Esther Perel is also credited as a consultant.)

This American version expands upon the characters more than Gay’s original film while consistently returning to the disappointment of Angela and Joe’s lives in terms both big and small. Neither of them are the people they once thought they might become. Whether two people who are each unhappy can make it as a couple becomes the overriding theme of the film.

This is Wilde’s third movie as a director and it is, by far, her most cohesive and accomplished, both contained and expansive. Her debut, 2019’s charming end-of-high-school tale “Booksmart,” had a throw-everything-at-the-wall quality, as if she wanted to get out every idea and try every trick in case she never got another chance to direct. Wilde’s follow-up, the 2022 psychodrama “Don’t Worry Darling,” became mired in behind-the-scenes gossip and tabloid speculation that overshadowed what was intended as a stylized portrait of female rage and discontent.

Her latest fulfills and exceeds the promise of those earlier movies. Shot on 35mm film by cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra, the action of “The Invite” is almost entirely confined to Angela and Joe’s apartment, which thanks to a recent renovation has plenty of rooms to explore. All four players are exceptional in their roles, playing smartly off their screen personas while exploring the nuances of the characters and their intersecting dynamics.

Wilde’s Angela is expressive and antic; Rogen’s Joe is sullen and snarky. Cruz is alluring and watchful, while Norton turns out to be the film’s secret weapon. He has a low-key comic energy and helps guide the story through a few of its trickier emotional turns. At one point he simply rises from behind a couch and it plays like a punchline.

Skip the next two paragraphs if you want to hold onto the film’s purest pleasures. Those noises from upstairs have been Piña and Hawk hosting group sex parties and they are now cruising Angela and Joe for some extramarital couples’ fun. Here, the movie pivots from passive-aggressive party conversation into farce, as Angela and Joe try to process the idea anyone else might find them desirable, as they have long since given up on seeing themselves in that way.

Wilde in particular lights up during this section, Angela’s mind racing at possibilities she never considered for herself while fumbling over the practicalities of protocols and just how this would work. Before pushing the film into its final forlorn section, the excitement that something sexy might happen charges the actors. It is very likely that streams of Sade’s seductive “By Your Side” will skyrocket.

But the focus stays very much on the struggles of married life. One of the biggest strengths of “The Invite” is the way it keeps evolving as the night progresses so it never feels claustrophobic or repetitive. There is a sense of visual invention and imagination to the film that continues all the way through, such as a moment when Wilde crouches down to check on a doomed soufflé in the oven and addresses the camera directly, looking up as if talking to Rogen. The viewer is frequently placed in an adjacent POV to the different characters, as if you are there in the room too.

The film has a propulsive rhythm to it, a relentlessness, even as Wilde and editors Yorgos Mavropsaridis and Anthony Boys know when to ease off the throttle and take it easy for a bit. The film breathes in a dynamic way, the last few beats taking a startling turn toward a somber wistfulness. The ending is just enigmatic enough to have audiences talking it through as they make their way out of the theater.

The end credits include a handwritten dedication, “For Diane,” a nod to Diane Keaton. The live-wire wit and idiosyncratic verve that she embodied in “Reds” and “Something’s Gotta Give” are very much on display here. Early in the story, Norton dryly notes, “We love a contentious environment.” Thanks to Wilde’s confident direction and the ensemble’s unpredictable performances, audiences will too.

For a long time, the lifestyles and foibles of the modest bourgeoisie were a mainstay of art-house cinema, with urbane, upscale audiences happy to turn out to see versions of their own lives depicted on the screen. But more recently, as ideas about what middle age looks like have shifted, along with the changing demographics of viewers, these films have largely disappeared. Which is what makes the seriocomic “The Invite” feel both fresh and something of a throwback — a movie for those who worry about losing their edge.

Directed by Olivia Wilde, “The Invite” was a clear standout when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and now arrives in theaters as one of the best dramas of the year so far. It feels daring for how it wants to actually examine the emotional costs of contemporary grown-up life, bringing wincing laughs of recognition.

The film begins with married couple Angela and Joe, played by Wilde and Seth Rogen, checking back in at their home in San Francisco at the end of the day. He has been at the teaching job he resents and she has been frantically preparing for the dinner party she may not have told him about. Their daughter is away at a sleepover for the evening and it seems they no longer fully know how to relate to each other. As they bicker and jab, their quiet dissatisfaction with their lives stops being so quiet.

Angela has invited over their neighbors from the apartment upstairs, who they do not know well and who often have loud sex. That couple, Piña and Hawk, played by Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton, seems more assured, self-possessed and adventurous, the kind of people you can absent-mindedly invent stories about, assuming their lives are much cooler than your own.

Things go in ways both expected and unexpected, the two couples warily feeling each other out as they wait to spring their own private agendas. Over the course of the evening, things will be alternately tense, flirty, vulnerable and revelatory as surprisingly little food is eaten. (Other substances get ingested instead.)

An adaptation of Cesc Gay’s 2020 Spanish film “Sentimental,” the screenplay is credited to Rashida Jones and Will McCormack. In an unusual step, the script was further workshopped and developed with the cast during rehearsals. Rogen came up with some of the biggest laugh lines and Norton wrote the deeply earnest monologue he delivers late in the film. (The popular Belgian psychotherapist Esther Perel is also credited as a consultant.)

This American version expands upon the characters more than Gay’s original film while consistently returning to the disappointment of Angela and Joe’s lives in terms both big and small. Neither of them are the people they once thought they might become. Whether two people who are each unhappy can make it as a couple becomes the overriding theme of the film.

This is Wilde’s third movie as a director and it is, by far, her most cohesive and accomplished, both contained and expansive. Her debut, 2019’s charming end-of-high-school tale “Booksmart,” had a throw-everything-at-the-wall quality, as if she wanted to get out every idea and try every trick in case she never got another chance to direct. Wilde’s follow-up, the 2022 psychodrama “Don’t Worry Darling,” became mired in behind-the-scenes gossip and tabloid speculation that overshadowed what was intended as a stylized portrait of female rage and discontent.

Her latest fulfills and exceeds the promise of those earlier movies. Shot on 35mm film by cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra, the action of “The Invite” is almost entirely confined to Angela and Joe’s apartment, which thanks to a recent renovation has plenty of rooms to explore. All four players are exceptional in their roles, playing smartly off their screen personas while exploring the nuances of the characters and their intersecting dynamics.

Wilde’s Angela is expressive and antic; Rogen’s Joe is sullen and snarky. Cruz is alluring and watchful, while Norton turns out to be the film’s secret weapon. He has a low-key comic energy and helps guide the story through a few of its trickier emotional turns. At one point he simply rises from behind a couch and it plays like a punchline.

Skip the next two paragraphs if you want to hold onto the film’s purest pleasures. Those noises from upstairs have been Piña and Hawk hosting group sex parties and they are now cruising Angela and Joe for some extramarital couples’ fun. Here, the movie pivots from passive-aggressive party conversation into farce, as Angela and Joe try to process the idea anyone else might find them desirable, as they have long since given up on seeing themselves in that way.

Wilde in particular lights up during this section, Angela’s mind racing at possibilities she never considered for herself while fumbling over the practicalities of protocols and just how this would work. Before pushing the film into its final forlorn section, the excitement that something sexy might happen charges the actors. It is very likely that streams of Sade’s seductive “By Your Side” will skyrocket.

But the focus stays very much on the struggles of married life. One of the biggest strengths of “The Invite” is the way it keeps evolving as the night progresses so it never feels claustrophobic or repetitive. There is a sense of visual invention and imagination to the film that continues all the way through, such as a moment when Wilde crouches down to check on a doomed soufflé in the oven and addresses the camera directly, looking up as if talking to Rogen. The viewer is frequently placed in an adjacent POV to the different characters, as if you are there in the room too.

The film has a propulsive rhythm to it, a relentlessness, even as Wilde and editors Yorgos Mavropsaridis and Anthony Boys know when to ease off the throttle and take it easy for a bit. The film breathes in a dynamic way, the last few beats taking a startling turn toward a somber wistfulness. The ending is just enigmatic enough to have audiences talking it through as they make their way out of the theater.

The end credits include a handwritten dedication, “For Diane,” a nod to Diane Keaton. The live-wire wit and idiosyncratic verve that she embodied in “Reds” and “Something’s Gotta Give” are very much on display here. Early in the story, Norton dryly notes, “We love a contentious environment.” Thanks to Wilde’s confident direction and the ensemble’s unpredictable performances, audiences will too.

For a long time, the lifestyles and foibles of the modest bourgeoisie were a mainstay of art-house cinema, with urbane, upscale audiences happy to turn out to see versions of their own lives depicted on the screen. But more recently, as ideas about what middle age looks like have shifted, along with the changing demographics of viewers, these films have largely disappeared. Which is what makes the seriocomic “The Invite” feel both fresh and something of a throwback — a movie for those who worry about losing their edge.

Directed by Olivia Wilde, “The Invite” was a clear standout when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and now arrives in theaters as one of the best dramas of the year so far. It feels daring for how it wants to actually examine the emotional costs of contemporary grown-up life, bringing wincing laughs of recognition.

The film begins with married couple Angela and Joe, played by Wilde and Seth Rogen, checking back in at their home in San Francisco at the end of the day. He has been at the teaching job he resents and she has been frantically preparing for the dinner party she may not have told him about. Their daughter is away at a sleepover for the evening and it seems they no longer fully know how to relate to each other. As they bicker and jab, their quiet dissatisfaction with their lives stops being so quiet.

Angela has invited over their neighbors from the apartment upstairs, who they do not know well and who often have loud sex. That couple, Piña and Hawk, played by Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton, seems more assured, self-possessed and adventurous, the kind of people you can absent-mindedly invent stories about, assuming their lives are much cooler than your own.

Things go in ways both expected and unexpected, the two couples warily feeling each other out as they wait to spring their own private agendas. Over the course of the evening, things will be alternately tense, flirty, vulnerable and revelatory as surprisingly little food is eaten. (Other substances get ingested instead.)

An adaptation of Cesc Gay’s 2020 Spanish film “Sentimental,” the screenplay is credited to Rashida Jones and Will McCormack. In an unusual step, the script was further workshopped and developed with the cast during rehearsals. Rogen came up with some of the biggest laugh lines and Norton wrote the deeply earnest monologue he delivers late in the film. (The popular Belgian psychotherapist Esther Perel is also credited as a consultant.)

This American version expands upon the characters more than Gay’s original film while consistently returning to the disappointment of Angela and Joe’s lives in terms both big and small. Neither of them are the people they once thought they might become. Whether two people who are each unhappy can make it as a couple becomes the overriding theme of the film.

This is Wilde’s third movie as a director and it is, by far, her most cohesive and accomplished, both contained and expansive. Her debut, 2019’s charming end-of-high-school tale “Booksmart,” had a throw-everything-at-the-wall quality, as if she wanted to get out every idea and try every trick in case she never got another chance to direct. Wilde’s follow-up, the 2022 psychodrama “Don’t Worry Darling,” became mired in behind-the-scenes gossip and tabloid speculation that overshadowed what was intended as a stylized portrait of female rage and discontent.

Her latest fulfills and exceeds the promise of those earlier movies. Shot on 35mm film by cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra, the action of “The Invite” is almost entirely confined to Angela and Joe’s apartment, which thanks to a recent renovation has plenty of rooms to explore. All four players are exceptional in their roles, playing smartly off their screen personas while exploring the nuances of the characters and their intersecting dynamics.

Wilde’s Angela is expressive and antic; Rogen’s Joe is sullen and snarky. Cruz is alluring and watchful, while Norton turns out to be the film’s secret weapon. He has a low-key comic energy and helps guide the story through a few of its trickier emotional turns. At one point he simply rises from behind a couch and it plays like a punchline.

Skip the next two paragraphs if you want to hold onto the film’s purest pleasures. Those noises from upstairs have been Piña and Hawk hosting group sex parties and they are now cruising Angela and Joe for some extramarital couples’ fun. Here, the movie pivots from passive-aggressive party conversation into farce, as Angela and Joe try to process the idea anyone else might find them desirable, as they have long since given up on seeing themselves in that way.

Wilde in particular lights up during this section, Angela’s mind racing at possibilities she never considered for herself while fumbling over the practicalities of protocols and just how this would work. Before pushing the film into its final forlorn section, the excitement that something sexy might happen charges the actors. It is very likely that streams of Sade’s seductive “By Your Side” will skyrocket.

But the focus stays very much on the struggles of married life. One of the biggest strengths of “The Invite” is the way it keeps evolving as the night progresses so it never feels claustrophobic or repetitive. There is a sense of visual invention and imagination to the film that continues all the way through, such as a moment when Wilde crouches down to check on a doomed soufflé in the oven and addresses the camera directly, looking up as if talking to Rogen. The viewer is frequently placed in an adjacent POV to the different characters, as if you are there in the room too.

The film has a propulsive rhythm to it, a relentlessness, even as Wilde and editors Yorgos Mavropsaridis and Anthony Boys know when to ease off the throttle and take it easy for a bit. The film breathes in a dynamic way, the last few beats taking a startling turn toward a somber wistfulness. The ending is just enigmatic enough to have audiences talking it through as they make their way out of the theater.

The end credits include a handwritten dedication, “For Diane,” a nod to Diane Keaton. The live-wire wit and idiosyncratic verve that she embodied in “Reds” and “Something’s Gotta Give” are very much on display here. Early in the story, Norton dryly notes, “We love a contentious environment.” Thanks to Wilde’s confident direction and the ensemble’s unpredictable performances, audiences will too.

For a long time, the lifestyles and foibles of the modest bourgeoisie were a mainstay of art-house cinema, with urbane, upscale audiences happy to turn out to see versions of their own lives depicted on the screen. But more recently, as ideas about what middle age looks like have shifted, along with the changing demographics of viewers, these films have largely disappeared. Which is what makes the seriocomic “The Invite” feel both fresh and something of a throwback — a movie for those who worry about losing their edge.

Directed by Olivia Wilde, “The Invite” was a clear standout when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and now arrives in theaters as one of the best dramas of the year so far. It feels daring for how it wants to actually examine the emotional costs of contemporary grown-up life, bringing wincing laughs of recognition.

The film begins with married couple Angela and Joe, played by Wilde and Seth Rogen, checking back in at their home in San Francisco at the end of the day. He has been at the teaching job he resents and she has been frantically preparing for the dinner party she may not have told him about. Their daughter is away at a sleepover for the evening and it seems they no longer fully know how to relate to each other. As they bicker and jab, their quiet dissatisfaction with their lives stops being so quiet.

Angela has invited over their neighbors from the apartment upstairs, who they do not know well and who often have loud sex. That couple, Piña and Hawk, played by Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton, seems more assured, self-possessed and adventurous, the kind of people you can absent-mindedly invent stories about, assuming their lives are much cooler than your own.

Things go in ways both expected and unexpected, the two couples warily feeling each other out as they wait to spring their own private agendas. Over the course of the evening, things will be alternately tense, flirty, vulnerable and revelatory as surprisingly little food is eaten. (Other substances get ingested instead.)

An adaptation of Cesc Gay’s 2020 Spanish film “Sentimental,” the screenplay is credited to Rashida Jones and Will McCormack. In an unusual step, the script was further workshopped and developed with the cast during rehearsals. Rogen came up with some of the biggest laugh lines and Norton wrote the deeply earnest monologue he delivers late in the film. (The popular Belgian psychotherapist Esther Perel is also credited as a consultant.)

This American version expands upon the characters more than Gay’s original film while consistently returning to the disappointment of Angela and Joe’s lives in terms both big and small. Neither of them are the people they once thought they might become. Whether two people who are each unhappy can make it as a couple becomes the overriding theme of the film.

This is Wilde’s third movie as a director and it is, by far, her most cohesive and accomplished, both contained and expansive. Her debut, 2019’s charming end-of-high-school tale “Booksmart,” had a throw-everything-at-the-wall quality, as if she wanted to get out every idea and try every trick in case she never got another chance to direct. Wilde’s follow-up, the 2022 psychodrama “Don’t Worry Darling,” became mired in behind-the-scenes gossip and tabloid speculation that overshadowed what was intended as a stylized portrait of female rage and discontent.

Her latest fulfills and exceeds the promise of those earlier movies. Shot on 35mm film by cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra, the action of “The Invite” is almost entirely confined to Angela and Joe’s apartment, which thanks to a recent renovation has plenty of rooms to explore. All four players are exceptional in their roles, playing smartly off their screen personas while exploring the nuances of the characters and their intersecting dynamics.

Wilde’s Angela is expressive and antic; Rogen’s Joe is sullen and snarky. Cruz is alluring and watchful, while Norton turns out to be the film’s secret weapon. He has a low-key comic energy and helps guide the story through a few of its trickier emotional turns. At one point he simply rises from behind a couch and it plays like a punchline.

Skip the next two paragraphs if you want to hold onto the film’s purest pleasures. Those noises from upstairs have been Piña and Hawk hosting group sex parties and they are now cruising Angela and Joe for some extramarital couples’ fun. Here, the movie pivots from passive-aggressive party conversation into farce, as Angela and Joe try to process the idea anyone else might find them desirable, as they have long since given up on seeing themselves in that way.

Wilde in particular lights up during this section, Angela’s mind racing at possibilities she never considered for herself while fumbling over the practicalities of protocols and just how this would work. Before pushing the film into its final forlorn section, the excitement that something sexy might happen charges the actors. It is very likely that streams of Sade’s seductive “By Your Side” will skyrocket.

But the focus stays very much on the struggles of married life. One of the biggest strengths of “The Invite” is the way it keeps evolving as the night progresses so it never feels claustrophobic or repetitive. There is a sense of visual invention and imagination to the film that continues all the way through, such as a moment when Wilde crouches down to check on a doomed soufflé in the oven and addresses the camera directly, looking up as if talking to Rogen. The viewer is frequently placed in an adjacent POV to the different characters, as if you are there in the room too.

The film has a propulsive rhythm to it, a relentlessness, even as Wilde and editors Yorgos Mavropsaridis and Anthony Boys know when to ease off the throttle and take it easy for a bit. The film breathes in a dynamic way, the last few beats taking a startling turn toward a somber wistfulness. The ending is just enigmatic enough to have audiences talking it through as they make their way out of the theater.

The end credits include a handwritten dedication, “For Diane,” a nod to Diane Keaton. The live-wire wit and idiosyncratic verve that she embodied in “Reds” and “Something’s Gotta Give” are very much on display here. Early in the story, Norton dryly notes, “We love a contentious environment.” Thanks to Wilde’s confident direction and the ensemble’s unpredictable performances, audiences will too.

For a long time, the lifestyles and foibles of the modest bourgeoisie were a mainstay of art-house cinema, with urbane, upscale audiences happy to turn out to see versions of their own lives depicted on the screen. But more recently, as ideas about what middle age looks like have shifted, along with the changing demographics of viewers, these films have largely disappeared. Which is what makes the seriocomic “The Invite” feel both fresh and something of a throwback — a movie for those who worry about losing their edge.

Directed by Olivia Wilde, “The Invite” was a clear standout when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and now arrives in theaters as one of the best dramas of the year so far. It feels daring for how it wants to actually examine the emotional costs of contemporary grown-up life, bringing wincing laughs of recognition.

The film begins with married couple Angela and Joe, played by Wilde and Seth Rogen, checking back in at their home in San Francisco at the end of the day. He has been at the teaching job he resents and she has been frantically preparing for the dinner party she may not have told him about. Their daughter is away at a sleepover for the evening and it seems they no longer fully know how to relate to each other. As they bicker and jab, their quiet dissatisfaction with their lives stops being so quiet.

Angela has invited over their neighbors from the apartment upstairs, who they do not know well and who often have loud sex. That couple, Piña and Hawk, played by Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton, seems more assured, self-possessed and adventurous, the kind of people you can absent-mindedly invent stories about, assuming their lives are much cooler than your own.

Things go in ways both expected and unexpected, the two couples warily feeling each other out as they wait to spring their own private agendas. Over the course of the evening, things will be alternately tense, flirty, vulnerable and revelatory as surprisingly little food is eaten. (Other substances get ingested instead.)

An adaptation of Cesc Gay’s 2020 Spanish film “Sentimental,” the screenplay is credited to Rashida Jones and Will McCormack. In an unusual step, the script was further workshopped and developed with the cast during rehearsals. Rogen came up with some of the biggest laugh lines and Norton wrote the deeply earnest monologue he delivers late in the film. (The popular Belgian psychotherapist Esther Perel is also credited as a consultant.)

This American version expands upon the characters more than Gay’s original film while consistently returning to the disappointment of Angela and Joe’s lives in terms both big and small. Neither of them are the people they once thought they might become. Whether two people who are each unhappy can make it as a couple becomes the overriding theme of the film.

This is Wilde’s third movie as a director and it is, by far, her most cohesive and accomplished, both contained and expansive. Her debut, 2019’s charming end-of-high-school tale “Booksmart,” had a throw-everything-at-the-wall quality, as if she wanted to get out every idea and try every trick in case she never got another chance to direct. Wilde’s follow-up, the 2022 psychodrama “Don’t Worry Darling,” became mired in behind-the-scenes gossip and tabloid speculation that overshadowed what was intended as a stylized portrait of female rage and discontent.

Her latest fulfills and exceeds the promise of those earlier movies. Shot on 35mm film by cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra, the action of “The Invite” is almost entirely confined to Angela and Joe’s apartment, which thanks to a recent renovation has plenty of rooms to explore. All four players are exceptional in their roles, playing smartly off their screen personas while exploring the nuances of the characters and their intersecting dynamics.

Wilde’s Angela is expressive and antic; Rogen’s Joe is sullen and snarky. Cruz is alluring and watchful, while Norton turns out to be the film’s secret weapon. He has a low-key comic energy and helps guide the story through a few of its trickier emotional turns. At one point he simply rises from behind a couch and it plays like a punchline.

Skip the next two paragraphs if you want to hold onto the film’s purest pleasures. Those noises from upstairs have been Piña and Hawk hosting group sex parties and they are now cruising Angela and Joe for some extramarital couples’ fun. Here, the movie pivots from passive-aggressive party conversation into farce, as Angela and Joe try to process the idea anyone else might find them desirable, as they have long since given up on seeing themselves in that way.

Wilde in particular lights up during this section, Angela’s mind racing at possibilities she never considered for herself while fumbling over the practicalities of protocols and just how this would work. Before pushing the film into its final forlorn section, the excitement that something sexy might happen charges the actors. It is very likely that streams of Sade’s seductive “By Your Side” will skyrocket.

But the focus stays very much on the struggles of married life. One of the biggest strengths of “The Invite” is the way it keeps evolving as the night progresses so it never feels claustrophobic or repetitive. There is a sense of visual invention and imagination to the film that continues all the way through, such as a moment when Wilde crouches down to check on a doomed soufflé in the oven and addresses the camera directly, looking up as if talking to Rogen. The viewer is frequently placed in an adjacent POV to the different characters, as if you are there in the room too.

The film has a propulsive rhythm to it, a relentlessness, even as Wilde and editors Yorgos Mavropsaridis and Anthony Boys know when to ease off the throttle and take it easy for a bit. The film breathes in a dynamic way, the last few beats taking a startling turn toward a somber wistfulness. The ending is just enigmatic enough to have audiences talking it through as they make their way out of the theater.

The end credits include a handwritten dedication, “For Diane,” a nod to Diane Keaton. The live-wire wit and idiosyncratic verve that she embodied in “Reds” and “Something’s Gotta Give” are very much on display here. Early in the story, Norton dryly notes, “We love a contentious environment.” Thanks to Wilde’s confident direction and the ensemble’s unpredictable performances, audiences will too.

For a long time, the lifestyles and foibles of the modest bourgeoisie were a mainstay of art-house cinema, with urbane, upscale audiences happy to turn out to see versions of their own lives depicted on the screen. But more recently, as ideas about what middle age looks like have shifted, along with the changing demographics of viewers, these films have largely disappeared. Which is what makes the seriocomic “The Invite” feel both fresh and something of a throwback — a movie for those who worry about losing their edge.

Directed by Olivia Wilde, “The Invite” was a clear standout when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and now arrives in theaters as one of the best dramas of the year so far. It feels daring for how it wants to actually examine the emotional costs of contemporary grown-up life, bringing wincing laughs of recognition.

The film begins with married couple Angela and Joe, played by Wilde and Seth Rogen, checking back in at their home in San Francisco at the end of the day. He has been at the teaching job he resents and she has been frantically preparing for the dinner party she may not have told him about. Their daughter is away at a sleepover for the evening and it seems they no longer fully know how to relate to each other. As they bicker and jab, their quiet dissatisfaction with their lives stops being so quiet.

Angela has invited over their neighbors from the apartment upstairs, who they do not know well and who often have loud sex. That couple, Piña and Hawk, played by Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton, seems more assured, self-possessed and adventurous, the kind of people you can absent-mindedly invent stories about, assuming their lives are much cooler than your own.

Things go in ways both expected and unexpected, the two couples warily feeling each other out as they wait to spring their own private agendas. Over the course of the evening, things will be alternately tense, flirty, vulnerable and revelatory as surprisingly little food is eaten. (Other substances get ingested instead.)

An adaptation of Cesc Gay’s 2020 Spanish film “Sentimental,” the screenplay is credited to Rashida Jones and Will McCormack. In an unusual step, the script was further workshopped and developed with the cast during rehearsals. Rogen came up with some of the biggest laugh lines and Norton wrote the deeply earnest monologue he delivers late in the film. (The popular Belgian psychotherapist Esther Perel is also credited as a consultant.)

This American version expands upon the characters more than Gay’s original film while consistently returning to the disappointment of Angela and Joe’s lives in terms both big and small. Neither of them are the people they once thought they might become. Whether two people who are each unhappy can make it as a couple becomes the overriding theme of the film.

This is Wilde’s third movie as a director and it is, by far, her most cohesive and accomplished, both contained and expansive. Her debut, 2019’s charming end-of-high-school tale “Booksmart,” had a throw-everything-at-the-wall quality, as if she wanted to get out every idea and try every trick in case she never got another chance to direct. Wilde’s follow-up, the 2022 psychodrama “Don’t Worry Darling,” became mired in behind-the-scenes gossip and tabloid speculation that overshadowed what was intended as a stylized portrait of female rage and discontent.

Her latest fulfills and exceeds the promise of those earlier movies. Shot on 35mm film by cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra, the action of “The Invite” is almost entirely confined to Angela and Joe’s apartment, which thanks to a recent renovation has plenty of rooms to explore. All four players are exceptional in their roles, playing smartly off their screen personas while exploring the nuances of the characters and their intersecting dynamics.

Wilde’s Angela is expressive and antic; Rogen’s Joe is sullen and snarky. Cruz is alluring and watchful, while Norton turns out to be the film’s secret weapon. He has a low-key comic energy and helps guide the story through a few of its trickier emotional turns. At one point he simply rises from behind a couch and it plays like a punchline.

Skip the next two paragraphs if you want to hold onto the film’s purest pleasures. Those noises from upstairs have been Piña and Hawk hosting group sex parties and they are now cruising Angela and Joe for some extramarital couples’ fun. Here, the movie pivots from passive-aggressive party conversation into farce, as Angela and Joe try to process the idea anyone else might find them desirable, as they have long since given up on seeing themselves in that way.

Wilde in particular lights up during this section, Angela’s mind racing at possibilities she never considered for herself while fumbling over the practicalities of protocols and just how this would work. Before pushing the film into its final forlorn section, the excitement that something sexy might happen charges the actors. It is very likely that streams of Sade’s seductive “By Your Side” will skyrocket.

But the focus stays very much on the struggles of married life. One of the biggest strengths of “The Invite” is the way it keeps evolving as the night progresses so it never feels claustrophobic or repetitive. There is a sense of visual invention and imagination to the film that continues all the way through, such as a moment when Wilde crouches down to check on a doomed soufflé in the oven and addresses the camera directly, looking up as if talking to Rogen. The viewer is frequently placed in an adjacent POV to the different characters, as if you are there in the room too.

The film has a propulsive rhythm to it, a relentlessness, even as Wilde and editors Yorgos Mavropsaridis and Anthony Boys know when to ease off the throttle and take it easy for a bit. The film breathes in a dynamic way, the last few beats taking a startling turn toward a somber wistfulness. The ending is just enigmatic enough to have audiences talking it through as they make their way out of the theater.

The end credits include a handwritten dedication, “For Diane,” a nod to Diane Keaton. The live-wire wit and idiosyncratic verve that she embodied in “Reds” and “Something’s Gotta Give” are very much on display here. Early in the story, Norton dryly notes, “We love a contentious environment.” Thanks to Wilde’s confident direction and the ensemble’s unpredictable performances, audiences will too.

For a long time, the lifestyles and foibles of the modest bourgeoisie were a mainstay of art-house cinema, with urbane, upscale audiences happy to turn out to see versions of their own lives depicted on the screen. But more recently, as ideas about what middle age looks like have shifted, along with the changing demographics of viewers, these films have largely disappeared. Which is what makes the seriocomic “The Invite” feel both fresh and something of a throwback — a movie for those who worry about losing their edge.

Directed by Olivia Wilde, “The Invite” was a clear standout when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and now arrives in theaters as one of the best dramas of the year so far. It feels daring for how it wants to actually examine the emotional costs of contemporary grown-up life, bringing wincing laughs of recognition.

The film begins with married couple Angela and Joe, played by Wilde and Seth Rogen, checking back in at their home in San Francisco at the end of the day. He has been at the teaching job he resents and she has been frantically preparing for the dinner party she may not have told him about. Their daughter is away at a sleepover for the evening and it seems they no longer fully know how to relate to each other. As they bicker and jab, their quiet dissatisfaction with their lives stops being so quiet.

Angela has invited over their neighbors from the apartment upstairs, who they do not know well and who often have loud sex. That couple, Piña and Hawk, played by Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton, seems more assured, self-possessed and adventurous, the kind of people you can absent-mindedly invent stories about, assuming their lives are much cooler than your own.

Things go in ways both expected and unexpected, the two couples warily feeling each other out as they wait to spring their own private agendas. Over the course of the evening, things will be alternately tense, flirty, vulnerable and revelatory as surprisingly little food is eaten. (Other substances get ingested instead.)

An adaptation of Cesc Gay’s 2020 Spanish film “Sentimental,” the screenplay is credited to Rashida Jones and Will McCormack. In an unusual step, the script was further workshopped and developed with the cast during rehearsals. Rogen came up with some of the biggest laugh lines and Norton wrote the deeply earnest monologue he delivers late in the film. (The popular Belgian psychotherapist Esther Perel is also credited as a consultant.)

This American version expands upon the characters more than Gay’s original film while consistently returning to the disappointment of Angela and Joe’s lives in terms both big and small. Neither of them are the people they once thought they might become. Whether two people who are each unhappy can make it as a couple becomes the overriding theme of the film.

This is Wilde’s third movie as a director and it is, by far, her most cohesive and accomplished, both contained and expansive. Her debut, 2019’s charming end-of-high-school tale “Booksmart,” had a throw-everything-at-the-wall quality, as if she wanted to get out every idea and try every trick in case she never got another chance to direct. Wilde’s follow-up, the 2022 psychodrama “Don’t Worry Darling,” became mired in behind-the-scenes gossip and tabloid speculation that overshadowed what was intended as a stylized portrait of female rage and discontent.

Her latest fulfills and exceeds the promise of those earlier movies. Shot on 35mm film by cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra, the action of “The Invite” is almost entirely confined to Angela and Joe’s apartment, which thanks to a recent renovation has plenty of rooms to explore. All four players are exceptional in their roles, playing smartly off their screen personas while exploring the nuances of the characters and their intersecting dynamics.

Wilde’s Angela is expressive and antic; Rogen’s Joe is sullen and snarky. Cruz is alluring and watchful, while Norton turns out to be the film’s secret weapon. He has a low-key comic energy and helps guide the story through a few of its trickier emotional turns. At one point he simply rises from behind a couch and it plays like a punchline.

Skip the next two paragraphs if you want to hold onto the film’s purest pleasures. Those noises from upstairs have been Piña and Hawk hosting group sex parties and they are now cruising Angela and Joe for some extramarital couples’ fun. Here, the movie pivots from passive-aggressive party conversation into farce, as Angela and Joe try to process the idea anyone else might find them desirable, as they have long since given up on seeing themselves in that way.

Wilde in particular lights up during this section, Angela’s mind racing at possibilities she never considered for herself while fumbling over the practicalities of protocols and just how this would work. Before pushing the film into its final forlorn section, the excitement that something sexy might happen charges the actors. It is very likely that streams of Sade’s seductive “By Your Side” will skyrocket.

But the focus stays very much on the struggles of married life. One of the biggest strengths of “The Invite” is the way it keeps evolving as the night progresses so it never feels claustrophobic or repetitive. There is a sense of visual invention and imagination to the film that continues all the way through, such as a moment when Wilde crouches down to check on a doomed soufflé in the oven and addresses the camera directly, looking up as if talking to Rogen. The viewer is frequently placed in an adjacent POV to the different characters, as if you are there in the room too.

The film has a propulsive rhythm to it, a relentlessness, even as Wilde and editors Yorgos Mavropsaridis and Anthony Boys know when to ease off the throttle and take it easy for a bit. The film breathes in a dynamic way, the last few beats taking a startling turn toward a somber wistfulness. The ending is just enigmatic enough to have audiences talking it through as they make their way out of the theater.

The end credits include a handwritten dedication, “For Diane,” a nod to Diane Keaton. The live-wire wit and idiosyncratic verve that she embodied in “Reds” and “Something’s Gotta Give” are very much on display here. Early in the story, Norton dryly notes, “We love a contentious environment.” Thanks to Wilde’s confident direction and the ensemble’s unpredictable performances, audiences will too.

For a long time, the lifestyles and foibles of the modest bourgeoisie were a mainstay of art-house cinema, with urbane, upscale audiences happy to turn out to see versions of their own lives depicted on the screen. But more recently, as ideas about what middle age looks like have shifted, along with the changing demographics of viewers, these films have largely disappeared. Which is what makes the seriocomic “The Invite” feel both fresh and something of a throwback — a movie for those who worry about losing their edge.

Directed by Olivia Wilde, “The Invite” was a clear standout when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and now arrives in theaters as one of the best dramas of the year so far. It feels daring for how it wants to actually examine the emotional costs of contemporary grown-up life, bringing wincing laughs of recognition.

The film begins with married couple Angela and Joe, played by Wilde and Seth Rogen, checking back in at their home in San Francisco at the end of the day. He has been at the teaching job he resents and she has been frantically preparing for the dinner party she may not have told him about. Their daughter is away at a sleepover for the evening and it seems they no longer fully know how to relate to each other. As they bicker and jab, their quiet dissatisfaction with their lives stops being so quiet.

Angela has invited over their neighbors from the apartment upstairs, who they do not know well and who often have loud sex. That couple, Piña and Hawk, played by Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton, seems more assured, self-possessed and adventurous, the kind of people you can absent-mindedly invent stories about, assuming their lives are much cooler than your own.

Things go in ways both expected and unexpected, the two couples warily feeling each other out as they wait to spring their own private agendas. Over the course of the evening, things will be alternately tense, flirty, vulnerable and revelatory as surprisingly little food is eaten. (Other substances get ingested instead.)

An adaptation of Cesc Gay’s 2020 Spanish film “Sentimental,” the screenplay is credited to Rashida Jones and Will McCormack. In an unusual step, the script was further workshopped and developed with the cast during rehearsals. Rogen came up with some of the biggest laugh lines and Norton wrote the deeply earnest monologue he delivers late in the film. (The popular Belgian psychotherapist Esther Perel is also credited as a consultant.)

This American version expands upon the characters more than Gay’s original film while consistently returning to the disappointment of Angela and Joe’s lives in terms both big and small. Neither of them are the people they once thought they might become. Whether two people who are each unhappy can make it as a couple becomes the overriding theme of the film.

This is Wilde’s third movie as a director and it is, by far, her most cohesive and accomplished, both contained and expansive. Her debut, 2019’s charming end-of-high-school tale “Booksmart,” had a throw-everything-at-the-wall quality, as if she wanted to get out every idea and try every trick in case she never got another chance to direct. Wilde’s follow-up, the 2022 psychodrama “Don’t Worry Darling,” became mired in behind-the-scenes gossip and tabloid speculation that overshadowed what was intended as a stylized portrait of female rage and discontent.

Her latest fulfills and exceeds the promise of those earlier movies. Shot on 35mm film by cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra, the action of “The Invite” is almost entirely confined to Angela and Joe’s apartment, which thanks to a recent renovation has plenty of rooms to explore. All four players are exceptional in their roles, playing smartly off their screen personas while exploring the nuances of the characters and their intersecting dynamics.

Wilde’s Angela is expressive and antic; Rogen’s Joe is sullen and snarky. Cruz is alluring and watchful, while Norton turns out to be the film’s secret weapon. He has a low-key comic energy and helps guide the story through a few of its trickier emotional turns. At one point he simply rises from behind a couch and it plays like a punchline.

Skip the next two paragraphs if you want to hold onto the film’s purest pleasures. Those noises from upstairs have been Piña and Hawk hosting group sex parties and they are now cruising Angela and Joe for some extramarital couples’ fun. Here, the movie pivots from passive-aggressive party conversation into farce, as Angela and Joe try to process the idea anyone else might find them desirable, as they have long since given up on seeing themselves in that way.

Wilde in particular lights up during this section, Angela’s mind racing at possibilities she never considered for herself while fumbling over the practicalities of protocols and just how this would work. Before pushing the film into its final forlorn section, the excitement that something sexy might happen charges the actors. It is very likely that streams of Sade’s seductive “By Your Side” will skyrocket.

But the focus stays very much on the struggles of married life. One of the biggest strengths of “The Invite” is the way it keeps evolving as the night progresses so it never feels claustrophobic or repetitive. There is a sense of visual invention and imagination to the film that continues all the way through, such as a moment when Wilde crouches down to check on a doomed soufflé in the oven and addresses the camera directly, looking up as if talking to Rogen. The viewer is frequently placed in an adjacent POV to the different characters, as if you are there in the room too.

The film has a propulsive rhythm to it, a relentlessness, even as Wilde and editors Yorgos Mavropsaridis and Anthony Boys know when to ease off the throttle and take it easy for a bit. The film breathes in a dynamic way, the last few beats taking a startling turn toward a somber wistfulness. The ending is just enigmatic enough to have audiences talking it through as they make their way out of the theater.

The end credits include a handwritten dedication, “For Diane,” a nod to Diane Keaton. The live-wire wit and idiosyncratic verve that she embodied in “Reds” and “Something’s Gotta Give” are very much on display here. Early in the story, Norton dryly notes, “We love a contentious environment.” Thanks to Wilde’s confident direction and the ensemble’s unpredictable performances, audiences will too.

For a long time, the lifestyles and foibles of the modest bourgeoisie were a mainstay of art-house cinema, with urbane, upscale audiences happy to turn out to see versions of their own lives depicted on the screen. But more recently, as ideas about what middle age looks like have shifted, along with the changing demographics of viewers, these films have largely disappeared. Which is what makes the seriocomic “The Invite” feel both fresh and something of a throwback — a movie for those who worry about losing their edge.

Directed by Olivia Wilde, “The Invite” was a clear standout when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and now arrives in theaters as one of the best dramas of the year so far. It feels daring for how it wants to actually examine the emotional costs of contemporary grown-up life, bringing wincing laughs of recognition.

The film begins with married couple Angela and Joe, played by Wilde and Seth Rogen, checking back in at their home in San Francisco at the end of the day. He has been at the teaching job he resents and she has been frantically preparing for the dinner party she may not have told him about. Their daughter is away at a sleepover for the evening and it seems they no longer fully know how to relate to each other. As they bicker and jab, their quiet dissatisfaction with their lives stops being so quiet.

Angela has invited over their neighbors from the apartment upstairs, who they do not know well and who often have loud sex. That couple, Piña and Hawk, played by Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton, seems more assured, self-possessed and adventurous, the kind of people you can absent-mindedly invent stories about, assuming their lives are much cooler than your own.

Things go in ways both expected and unexpected, the two couples warily feeling each other out as they wait to spring their own private agendas. Over the course of the evening, things will be alternately tense, flirty, vulnerable and revelatory as surprisingly little food is eaten. (Other substances get ingested instead.)

An adaptation of Cesc Gay’s 2020 Spanish film “Sentimental,” the screenplay is credited to Rashida Jones and Will McCormack. In an unusual step, the script was further workshopped and developed with the cast during rehearsals. Rogen came up with some of the biggest laugh lines and Norton wrote the deeply earnest monologue he delivers late in the film. (The popular Belgian psychotherapist Esther Perel is also credited as a consultant.)

This American version expands upon the characters more than Gay’s original film while consistently returning to the disappointment of Angela and Joe’s lives in terms both big and small. Neither of them are the people they once thought they might become. Whether two people who are each unhappy can make it as a couple becomes the overriding theme of the film.

This is Wilde’s third movie as a director and it is, by far, her most cohesive and accomplished, both contained and expansive. Her debut, 2019’s charming end-of-high-school tale “Booksmart,” had a throw-everything-at-the-wall quality, as if she wanted to get out every idea and try every trick in case she never got another chance to direct. Wilde’s follow-up, the 2022 psychodrama “Don’t Worry Darling,” became mired in behind-the-scenes gossip and tabloid speculation that overshadowed what was intended as a stylized portrait of female rage and discontent.

Her latest fulfills and exceeds the promise of those earlier movies. Shot on 35mm film by cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra, the action of “The Invite” is almost entirely confined to Angela and Joe’s apartment, which thanks to a recent renovation has plenty of rooms to explore. All four players are exceptional in their roles, playing smartly off their screen personas while exploring the nuances of the characters and their intersecting dynamics.

Wilde’s Angela is expressive and antic; Rogen’s Joe is sullen and snarky. Cruz is alluring and watchful, while Norton turns out to be the film’s secret weapon. He has a low-key comic energy and helps guide the story through a few of its trickier emotional turns. At one point he simply rises from behind a couch and it plays like a punchline.

Skip the next two paragraphs if you want to hold onto the film’s purest pleasures. Those noises from upstairs have been Piña and Hawk hosting group sex parties and they are now cruising Angela and Joe for some extramarital couples’ fun. Here, the movie pivots from passive-aggressive party conversation into farce, as Angela and Joe try to process the idea anyone else might find them desirable, as they have long since given up on seeing themselves in that way.

Wilde in particular lights up during this section, Angela’s mind racing at possibilities she never considered for herself while fumbling over the practicalities of protocols and just how this would work. Before pushing the film into its final forlorn section, the excitement that something sexy might happen charges the actors. It is very likely that streams of Sade’s seductive “By Your Side” will skyrocket.

But the focus stays very much on the struggles of married life. One of the biggest strengths of “The Invite” is the way it keeps evolving as the night progresses so it never feels claustrophobic or repetitive. There is a sense of visual invention and imagination to the film that continues all the way through, such as a moment when Wilde crouches down to check on a doomed soufflé in the oven and addresses the camera directly, looking up as if talking to Rogen. The viewer is frequently placed in an adjacent POV to the different characters, as if you are there in the room too.

The film has a propulsive rhythm to it, a relentlessness, even as Wilde and editors Yorgos Mavropsaridis and Anthony Boys know when to ease off the throttle and take it easy for a bit. The film breathes in a dynamic way, the last few beats taking a startling turn toward a somber wistfulness. The ending is just enigmatic enough to have audiences talking it through as they make their way out of the theater.

The end credits include a handwritten dedication, “For Diane,” a nod to Diane Keaton. The live-wire wit and idiosyncratic verve that she embodied in “Reds” and “Something’s Gotta Give” are very much on display here. Early in the story, Norton dryly notes, “We love a contentious environment.” Thanks to Wilde’s confident direction and the ensemble’s unpredictable performances, audiences will too.