"Coyote vs. Acme"

 ☆☆☆½

Had it been made a generation ago, Coyote vs. Acme would have been hailed as a visionary masterpiece, a film of technical innovation and ingenuity. But since Who Framed Roger Rabbit got there first 38 years ago, Coyote vs. Acme can't claim high ground. That leaves the question of whether it works on its own, as a clever satirical comedy, and it mostly, but not completely, does.

What happened to Coyote vs. Acme on the way from its origins as a New Yorker magazine article — a sly spoof on the ridiculousness of corporate legalese — to a movie released by a tiny company called Ketchup Entertainment is strange and convoluted. It's stupid and unbelievable. It would have made a great cartoon.

In a nutshell, you probably know, Coyote vs. Acme was deemed a financial liability for the studio that produced it, Warner Bros., taken as a tax write-off, and shelved. For a couple of years, it sat, completely made and completely unseen. Now, little Ketchup has managed to get it into movie theaters.

Is it worth the wait? Maybe. Is it worth all the legal hand-wringing? Absolutely not. It's a fun, silly, weird, slightly overlong blend of animation and live-action, in which the long-suffering Coyote finally has it up to here with exploding, malfunctioning, injury-causing Acme products. You know, the ones he uses to try to capture, kill and eat the Road Runner, who only wants to speed through the desert going beep beep. (Or, as many fans insist, meep meep.)

Coyote, let's be honest, isn't a nice guy. Never has been. But the point of the cartoons is that nobody, even someone who wants to catch, slaughter and consume a little desert bird, deserves all that pain and torture. It's fun to see him hurt because he's trying to do such an awful thing. Then again, he's trying to do it because he's hungry. Really hungry.

Coyote, then, is a bit of an anti-hero. We want to see him succeed, but maybe not really. In Coyote vs. Acme, he enlists the help of a human lawyer Kevin Avery (there are lots of inside jokes for Looney Tunes fans), who sues Acme all the time for a few lousy bucks. But Coyote wants more. Much more. And soon the cartoon and the human are uncovering a vast conspiracy by Acme to do awful things to cartoons.

Yes, it's a lot like Who Framed Roger Rabbit. There's even a scene where the human and cartoon characters enter a tunnel. It doesn't have Roger Rabbit's visual wit or satirical intelligence, but it's still pretty good. When it finally gets to the courtroom, things bog down, and there's a very strange decision by the writers and director to make a sweet, popular and mostly (but not always) innocent character into a genuine bad guy. 

Nonetheless, fans of Looney Tunes and cartoons as a whole will have a great time; people who grew up with Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies always on in the background will also enjoy this. Animation purists may be on the fence, since it takes liberties with a lot.

But it's inarguably entertaining, Will Forte brings humor and intelligence to his work as Kevin, and it's all  visually splendid and just funny enough. At times barely maybe, but it is good-humored and good-natured enough to be consistently entertaining while offering a wonderfully sly little wink-and-nod to what's happening in the world today. 

Viewed September 10, 2026 — Regal Sherman Oaks

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"Tony"

☆☆☆☆☆

An unusually strong year for movies continues with Tony, a highly fictionalized account of Anthony Bourdain's formative years before he dropped out of Vassar to attend the Culinary Institute of America. Tony could easily have turned into hagiography or, worse, perhaps, into a boring recitation of facts, but instead manages to become one of the most surprising and best movies of 2026.

Tony begins with a telling quote from Bourdain's own Kitchen Confidential: "I was — to be frank — a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, and badly in need of a good ass-kicking."

The promise of that title card may seem a big promise to fulfill, and a challenging one. The movie, directed by Matt Johnson, rises to that challenge by presenting us with teenaged Tony Bourdain played by Dominic Sessa (The Holdovers) as every bit as narcissistic and thoughtless as the real Bourdain suggested. 

He's remarkably confident, as maybe a lot of intelligent 19-year-olds are, and despite all evidence to the contrary, he is certain he is going to be the recipient of a novel-writing fellowship. When he doesn't, he steals from his parents and runs off to Provincetown, where he plans to find and woo a girl who wants nothing to do with him.

But crude, loud-mouthed Tony doesn't get much of a welcome in Cape Cod, and it's not long before he's sporting a black eye, broke and stuck. It's here that the unexpected theme of Tony kicks in, and it's got nothing to do with believing in yourself, or making your own way, or having courage — there's something deeper and richer at play.

On one level, Tony watches a young man discover who he is going to become, through a series of incidents that seems both natural and implausible — much like life is for many of us. Tony winds up a dishwasher in a local seafood joint that most people write off as a kind of fast food. It's run by a chef (Antonio Banderas), who would not like Tony much if he thought about him at all, which he doesn't. One of Tony's co-workers is Sal (Leo Woodall), who's no good for anyone, but he's magnetic and cheerful and impossible to resist. And slowly, that girl, Nancy (Emilia Jones) takes notice of Tony.

Little by little, life begins to happen to Tony, and the movie embraces — openly and sweetly — its central thesis: that "providence" is real, that if you look closely, what's happening to you isn't just what's happening to you, but is your life taking shape.

As someone who has never seen an episode of Bourdain's shows or read Kitchen Confidential, I walked into Tony with no awareness at all of its subject, intrigued only by a confident trailer. Though it could so easily have been, this isn't a move made only for Bourdain's fans. It is, in the best possible way, the "buildings-roman," as over-confident Tony repeatedly mispronounces bildungsroman. It's a coming-of-age story that happens to be about someone who became famous and wealthy — but the film, to its credit, never once mentions that.

It succeeds on the strength of its four remarkable central performances — Sessa, Woodall, Jones and Banderas, each of whom creates a rich and vibrant character, the kind of people you can imagine having full and interesting lives when they aren't on camera. Director Johnson, working from a screenplay he wrote with Matthew Miller, Todd Bartels and Lou Howe, finds real joy in his storytelling, even in its darker moments.

In Tony, he's taken the ingredients of a movie that could have been obvious, rote and endlessly reverential to its subject and instead created a rich and varied repast that's unexpectedly warm, satisfying and nourishing.

Viewed August 29, 2026 — AMC Topanga

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"Boorman and the Devil"

☆☆☆☆☆

Among the many seemingly impossible tasks accomplished by the remarkable documentary Boorman and the Devil is its refusal to turn 1977's Exorcist II: The Heretic into a good film that has been unfairly maligned. Instead, it examines how intelligent, talented, dedicated people created a disaster. If you watch Exorcist II after seeing this film, you'll still watch an incomprehensible mess. But you won't watch it the same way.

Boorman and the Devil is enticing to movie fans because it promises to deconstruct one of the most notorious flops in movie history, a movie so reviled by audiences that riots broke out at some movie theaters where it played. In the 49 years since its release, some people — Martin Scorsese among them —have tried to reassess it as a masterpiece.

Director John Boorman isn't one of them. The director of Excalibur and Deliverance and Hope and Glory, among others, spends a great deal of time on screen in Boorman and the Devil, and he knows the film was a catastrophe. He also remains proud of its accomplishments. Exorcist II: The Heretic has become for him something deeper and more profound than a failure: it is a wound that has never healed. It is the mistake of a lifetime.

Many of the people involved in the film view it that way, or at least as something far deeper, far richer, far more meaningful than simply a bad movie. It was an arduous, impressive effort. Everyone did the best work they could on it, from the actors to the technicians to the administrative crew. A number of them are interviewed in Boorman and the Devil. What they say about the film is revealing and sometimes actually heartbreaking: they knew there was a high risk of failure, but they are proud of what they did.

Boorman and the Devil is a work of passion and care from director David Kittredge, who seems almost painfully aware of how close Exorcist II: The Heretic is to camp, and wants to retain reverence while acknowledging the truth of the matter. Walking that fine line turns Boorman and the Devil into an uncommonly entertaining movie. It's funny, zany, wildly engaging, and endlessly fascinating.

Filled with clips not just from The Heretic but from dozens of other films that illustrate not just Boorman's history but the history of the time (summer 1977 turned out to be a momentous summer, as most movie fans will remember, but not because of the Exorcist sequel), it's a cinephile's dream. This is what you always hope movies about movies will be like, but too rarely are. It's ambitious, generous, and revelatory.

Yet Boorman and the Devil achieves something so much more than being a great documentary; it really is one of the very best films of 2026, of any kind (and this has been an uncommonly good year for movies) because of the rich, complicated, painful humanity at its core. Exorcist II: The Heretic wasn't a work of hubris. If it had been, the documentary would have become a sly, winking cautionary tale. Exorcist II: The Heretic was the work of deeply passionate people who were committed to creating something great ... and didn't. They all understand why, but none can quite explain it.

Actress Louise Fletcher, interviewed before her death in 2022, comes closest. Smiling through difficult memories, she professes a deep and believable lack of regret, but acknowledges the fundamental pain. She finds a metaphor in a great spaghetti dinner, in which all the good stuff and all the bad stuff is so tangled together the only thing to do is enjoy it all.

Hers is the best explanation, but Boorman is left with the deepest imponderable. The film bears his name. He made the decisions. He stands by them, wishing that he didn't have to. Boorman's genuinely remarkable interview, like this unmissable film itself, turns making a bad movie into a dissection of pain, regret, pride and self-awareness that will move everyone watching, artist or not, true believer or heretic.

Viewed August 18, 2026 — American Cinematheque / Aero Theater

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"The End of Oak Street"

 ☆☆½

The End of Oak Street tries so hard to be an Amblin/Steven Spielberg film from the 1980s that it's almost lovable in its earnestness. It wants so very, very badly to be a movie like the kind Spielberg directed and produced, a movie where unbelievable and sometimes terrible things happen to a family that lives on a happy, peaceful street in a happy, peaceful suburb somewhere in the United States.

But there's something that doesn't work quite right about The End of Oak Street, in which that happy, peaceful street in that happy, peaceful suburb is invaded not by extraterrestrials or poltergeists or Bigfoot or gremlins or treasure-hunting pirates but by ... dinosaurs.

Now, it's both unfair and a little lazy these days to criticize something by saying it feels like AI could have written it. And yet ... the screenplay to this film feels more than a little like it could have been generated with a prompt: "Write a movie that blends mid-1980s Amblin films with Jurassic Park — a suburban family has to fight off man-eating dinosaurs."

The movie is set in 1982, because it would never do to have an Amblin movie be about a 21st century family — otherwise, you'd never be able to have a poster of the J. Geils Band on a kid's wall (um, did kids actually become J. Geils groupies?); a moment where a character listens to Steve Winwood sing "Valerie" (um, did teenagers listen to Steve Winwood?); a period-authentic Froot Loops box; and, of course, kids on bicycles. Here's a note to filmmakers too young to have really lived through the time: bicycles weren't as ubiquitous as today's '80s-set entertainment makes them out to be.

There are short shorts for girls and for boys, a velour shirt for Dad (Ewan McGregor), a manual typewriter for furtive author Mom (Anne Hathaway) and, of course, hushed arguments about the worst thing anyone could imagine in the 1980s: divorce.

That is, at least, the worst thing that anyone could imagine in an Amblin film. There's also a family dog, Starbuck (no, not the coffee shop, the Battlestar Galactica character ... it's 1982!), who in a most un-Spielbergian touch is tied up and left outside at night. The moment I saw that, I lost a lot of my worry about whether the family would live or die. It's the most terrifying thing on screen.

So, this oddly imperfect simulacrum of 1982 is rocked one night by strange lightning storms, following an ominous radio news report about some kind of "ripples" happening in space, or something like that, and suddenly the whole of the neighborhood is overrun with dinosaurs.

Thank goodness plucky Mom is a crack shot with a shotgun! While the rest of the neighborhood gets squished and squashed and eaten and frequently decapitated by the dinosaurs, Mom and Dad and the kids have to outrun them. All the time. And no one has any idea why Oak Street suddenly dead ends at the Mesozoic era.

That includes the screenwriters. It's a strange thing to say, but it appears nobody really cared enough to explain why any of this happens. While I don't want to drop spoilers, though in this case it's not spoiling very much, it all has something to do with Carl Sagan and wormholes. I guess. Nobody seems to know, and frankly by the end of the movie there are hardly any residents of Oak Street left alive to care.

There's a lot of gore in The End of Oak Street, which is rated PG-13 but is probably too scary and intense for most of today's pre-teens. And one particularly gory and nasty scene gives the film a true moment of shock and surprise — which it undoes with a silly, perfunctory Back to the Future-style ending in which the characters we've been watching turn out to be ... well, never mind. If you're inclined to see it, you don't want to know; if you're not, you wouldn't believe it, anyway.

Everything in The End of Oak Street just sort of ... happens. There are some genuinely tense moments, and the film is neither poorly made nor poorly acted; in many ways, what Hathaway is required to do here is infinitely more difficult than what she did in The Odyssey, and she makes it credible. She's the best part of the movie, and the only one that doesn't feel like it's trying far too hard to be from the 1980s.

The biggest trouble with The End of Oak Street is that if it had been made in the 1980s, it would have failed. It doesn't have the heart, the awe or, especially, the wonder of those more innocent films. It's lean, hard and sometimes mean, even when it's trying to be just like those movies of yesteryear. The movies of yesteryear were a lot better.

Viewed August 17, 2026 — Regal Sherman Oaks

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"The Odyssey"

 ☆☆☆☆

The same rule applies to Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey as to every other film ever made: Is it a good story? Does it hold your attention and excite your senses and show you something that moves you, whether big or small?

Because if it does, then how it's made is irrelevant. Cinerama Holiday might be a fun novelty, but it fails as a movie. Comin' at Ya! may have shown off 3-D but it was a lousy movie. Now comes The Odyssey, the first-ever full-length movie shot with IMAX film cameras. For months, every IMAX 70mm film screening has been sold out. Over and over on social media, you'll see the posts: IMAX 70mm is the only way Christopher Nolan intends his film to be seen!

Only 41 movie theaters in the world can show The Odyssey in 70mm IMAX, so even if it's true that's the way Nolan would like people to see it, almost nobody will. The numbers don't pan out. At its height in the early 1960s, Cinerama had four times the number of theaters worldwide than IMAX has for 70mm film presentations.

So, what's going to matter most to audiences isn't the format, no matter what Nolan wants — it's the movie. Is it any good? Does it thrill? Does it excite the senses? Does it offer all the things a movie should?

Guess what? It does. This is no Amityville 3-D. It's not a gimmick. I saw The Odyssey projected in 70mm, which means I saw it projected on film more or less in the screen size and format most people over 40 grew up with. Nothing special, you might say. And the good news is, The Odyssey works. It works well.

Which isn't to say it's perfect, but as far as Nolan movies go, it's more accessible than most, it's more narratively engaging and emotionally compelling, and after seeing it I cracked open my print version of The Odyssey to read a little of what I had just seen — if nothing else, Christopher Nolan may turn a whole bunch of movie tech-heads into curious readers, and there's nothing wrong with that.

Nolan's version of The Odyssey, for which he's the credited screenwriter as well as director, begins, as so many of his movies do, with some rushed confusion. Nolan is never particularly concerned with how to accustom audiences to his stories — he throws them right in, and even though it takes some time to acclimate to The Odyssey, once that happens, the movie carries you along.

Matt Damon is Odysseus, both as a younger king and as an older man trying to make his way home after he's victorious in the Trojan War, thanks to that horse. Anne Hathaway is Penelope, his patient wife. Tom Holland is their son Telemachus. Robert Pattinson is Penelope's villainous suitor Antinous. And so forth. There's Zendaya! There's Charlize Theron! There's John Leguizamo! There's Lupita Nyong'o!

It's a wonder the poster for The Odyssey hasn't put all their faces into little boxes at the bottom. This is about as close to an old-fashioned "star-studded" cast as you're likely to find today, and sometimes the movie feels a little like a "spot-the-cameo" disaster movie, but I think that's part of the fun. Yes, it's serious stuff. Yes, it's made at a very high level of quality. But, still, it's a movie — and not just any movie, but one with gods and adventurers, a witch, a cyclops and a whirlpool, sirens and monsters and even a trip to the underworld (which looks an awful lot like Iceland).

In truth, The Odyssey could probably use a little of the levity of those old Ray Harryhausen films where Odysseus' first cousin Jason leads the Argonauts and fights all sorts of monsters on his way to the Golden Fleece. Nolan's Greek mythology is pretty grim and realistic by comparison.

At times, it can also be hard to follow. Nolan's movies are rarely straightforward, and The Odyssey can sometimes suffer from clunky editing that renders the action a little unclear and Nolan's favorite technique of muddying dialogue and overwhelming it with ear-throbbing sound design. It can be an overwhelmingly aggressive movie, at times, and its battle sequences can get pretty confusing.

But The Odyssey always finds its way back to a story that has survived 3,000 years. Nolan doesn't botch it. If anything, he adapts it with, on the whole, so much excitement and flair that he's done something important: Brought Homer into the 21st century and tied it, especially in the film's final few minutes, loosely but pointedly enough to the world as we know it today that suddenly these gods and monsters, who exist in a changing world rocked by war and betrayal, feel excitingly vibrant, real and relevant. In IMAX ... or not.

Viewed July 18, 2026 — American Cinematheque Director's Village

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Favorite Films: "Chinatown"

Not many films have been endlessly analyzed and examined as Roman Polanski's Chinatown. It would be foolish for me to try to add anything to the academic and artistic discussion of the movie. All I can do to explain why it's such a favorite is to try to share why it works on me so well, why it feels as urgent and vibrant and new today as it must have 52 years ago.

There's a scene in Chinatown that's a masterpiece of storytelling and suspense — not as if that doesn't apply to the entirety of this complicated, endlessly rewarding movie. J.J. Gittes (Jack Nicholson, of course) wants to know why a certain dead body has turned up in a certain reservoir. None of his police pals are going to give him anything more to go on. He'll have to do this alone.

So, there he is, behind the gates of the secure reservoir at night. We have no idea what he's looking for, because he has no idea what he's looking for—which, of course, is the plot of Chinatown in a nutshell: Gittes only knows he's onto something, he never has any idea what. Neither do we. Then, from the darkness:

"Hold it there, kittycat!"

An impeecably dressed little man holding a knife, played by Polanski himself, flashes a knife as Gittes' rival Claude Mulvihill pins him to a fence. "You know what happens to nosy fellas?" asks the ltitle man. I know, I know, I'm describing a scene you've probably seen a half-dozen times, but have you ever noticed the way the crickets chirp in the background? The inkiness of the night behind the fence?

These two little details are key to Chinatown, and Polanski doesn't make a big show about either. But, he's included them, perfectly, for a reason: Everything around Gittes is dark and unknowable, and the forces of nature that make it all work are entirely indifferent. As Chinatown progresses, Gittes uncovers and confronts evil and corruption on a magnitude he never imagined possible — and those crickets in the night? They'll keep chirping no matter what.

Chinatown is a despairing movie, a film that confronts real evil — not the imagined kind from The Exorcist, released the year before, but the kind that lives in our world. The kind we have to face every day. Polanski, just a few years after the ghastly murder of Sharon Tate, had lived through the Holocaust, but it's worth noting that J.J. Gittes and the other characters in Chinatown—which is set in 1937—have not. True, unexpurgated evil is unknown to them. So, it's understandable that as Gittes starts investigating the case he thought was brought to him by Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway), he has no idea of what he's getting himself into.

I've seen Chinatown innumerable times, and it's grown from a film I admired but didn't entirely understand to a movie that I think is utterly indispensable — not just in my mind, but to Hollywood and, to a larger extent, to an understanding of America. It's a movie whose real meaning is as deeply hidden as its solution, but once you uncover it, Chinatown takes on the feeling of a philosophical treatise.

That last line — "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown" — has been dissected over and over. It's become a cinematic version of semantic satiation, that odd experience of hearing a word so often that it loses its meaning. But keep examining that line, and what happens after it's spoken, and Chinatown truly reveals itself:

There's no explanation. The only thing you can do is walk away, stunned, into the night — that same night that consumes a world that has been here for millions of years and will be here for millions more, and takes no notice of your suffering, of cruelty, of pain and sorrow. You'll never, ever understand it. And the more you dig for answers, the fewer you'll find. People are terrible. The world is awful. And that's just the way it is.

Bleak? You bet. And yet, such despair has rarely been as involving as Polanski and screenwriter Robert Towne make it in Chinatown. As I watched it again a few weeks ago, time fell away — yes, it's easy to recognize young Jack Nicholson and young Faye Dunaway and long-gone John Huston and the rest. It's obvious the film was made a long time ago. And yet, the way it casts its spell, the way it grips the viewer and refuses to let go, makes it feel every bit as fresh and new as a movie made this year. It's perfectly cast, perfectly designed, perfectly edited, perfectly scored (by Jerry Goldsmith), perfectly shot (by John Alonzo), so perfectly crafted it seems almost set apart from other movies.

It's so easy to watch, so entertaining, so compelling, that it's not until those last couple of minutes that you're reminded, yet again, of everything the movie is meaning to say — that Gittes is every one of us. Poor, stupid Gittes, smart enough to find the truth but not smart enough to understand it. He keeps believing that somewhere, somehow, there's got to be a rational explanation. That if he just keeps trying, he'll find a way to stop all this. How painfully familiar all of that sounds right about now.

Like I said, it could have been made today.

"The Invite"

 ☆☆☆☆☆

There isn't a moment in Olivia Wilde's The Invite that feels false. I haven't seen The People Upstairs, the 2020 movie on which Rashida Jones and Will McCormack based their screenplay for this film, but as an exploration of a specific kind of American mores, values and stressors, The Invite feels wholly new, alive and relevant.

It's also very, very funny. The first thing a comedy like this has to do is make you laugh, and The Invite does, which is why some initial comparisons to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? seem off-base — The Invite is a sharply observed, perfectly delivered examination of a certain kind of marriage. I have a feeling a lot of people are going to wonder if Jones and McCormack were eavesdropping on them, especially for the first third of the movie.

In that opening, Seth Rogen and Wilde play Joe and Angela, a married couple in San Francisco who know each other maybe a little too well. They can anticipate almost every word the other will say, yet they have no idea how to adjust their own behavior to that knowledge. When the movie opens, Rogen, a disappointed music teacher, exhausts himself bicycling home. When he gets there, he discovers his wife has been preparing an elaborate dinner for the couple who live upstairs.

This is not what he wants. This is not the time. This is not the day. And there's no wine. Yet, in the way of married couples (straight, gay, young, old — almost any couple will see themselves in this film), she's not going to back down.

Soon enough, there's a knock at the door. It's Hawk (Edward Norton) and Pína (Penelope Cruz), and they are intruding at the worst possible moment for Joe. Then again, Joe doesn't have any best possible moments. Fumbling through an attempt at dinner, the four finally sit down to talk, and it turns out that Hawk and Pína have an ulterior motive. There's something they've been wanting to talk about.

It doesn't take much to find out what the topic is, but I'm not going to reveal it here, and the best way to experience The Invite is not to know it, either. But it's a balm for movie screens that have been beseiged by blockbusters and animated adventures and really loud movies playing in premium formats. The Invite has its sights set both lower and higher than that — it's a decidedly analog affair (Wilde shot it in 35 mm) that finds much more adventure and revelation in conversation than in action.

Eventually, the movie does work itself around to action, at least of a sort, which in turn leads The Invite to the most unexpected of destinations.

Jones and McCormack have crafted a screenplay of uncommon emotional intelligence, and though a lot of the setup is played for laughs, some slapsticky and some awkward, when it gets where it's going, the weight of it all is such that the audience I saw it with stopped the guffawing (there had been a lot of it) and went completely silent.

The Invite deals with the serious, messy, uncomfortable business of being an adult in an uncommonly frank way. The topic at its core is rarely explored in mainstream films, and almost never with this kind of genuine insight and empathy.

As Hawk and Pína challenge Joe and Angela in ways the latter couple could never have imagined when the night began, the movie also challenges the audience to examine long-held views about the way marriages and relationships work. It's serious stuff, but as a director Wilde knows how to handle it — and to balance it with observational, character-driven humor that never feels forced or unwelcome, though often feels like a relief.

In a single set, designed with curious flattening of colors that suggests a lot more about the characters than perhaps it's obvious at the outset, The Invite feels intimate, not claustrophobic. It may be physically constrained, but Norton, Cruz, Wilde and Rogen manage, through the way its characters grow and change in the course of an evening, to make it feel expansive and meaningful.

It's been an uncommonly good year for movies, but The Invite is among the very best of them.

Viewed July 14, 2026 — Regal Sherman Oaks

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