Premium supporters get advance access to our calendar of upcoming theatrical releases — the movies Drew and I are anticipating the most. Upgrade today before the next update rolls out at the end of the month.

56.25% of TNMN members hate surprises and refuse to see a movie without having watched the trailer first. The rest of us avoid the trailer at all costs. I’m with the avoid-the-trailer-at-all-costs crowd. I live dangerously.

The community watchlist category is horror movies. Submit a movie for a chance to win our annual mystery prize.

A couple hosts their neighbors for a dinner party.

→ Chamber pieces, dialogue. That is, films that take place in a single setting with only a few characters.

→ Disgruntled Seth Rogen. Maybe it’s just me, though I don’t think it is. There aren’t many things funnier than watching Seth Rogen get increasingly aggravated, and also a little bit high.

→ The cello. The string-dominated score, led by an anxiety-inducing cello, is indelible. It perfectly punctuates the film’s most potent, frantic moments. And it disappears entirely when the film is better served by the silence.

→ A little bit of everything. The Invite has a little bit of everything: well-choreographed tension and drama, wicked social commentary, and a sharply-realized sense of humor. A genuine feat for a chamber piece, in your author’s opinion.

Olivia Wilde’s The Invite is one of my favorite films of this decade, devilish in its willingness to throw four characters in a room together and let things go from a quiet simmer to a rolling boil, over and over again.

The script, penned by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack, is an incisive examination of love, sex, and the way our relationships evolve for better or worse.

The film has far more inertia than you might expect from a dialogue-propelled chamber piece, aided by a well-choreographed parade of shouty confrontations, uncomfortable silences, exposed white lies, and laid-bare insecurities.

The Invite looks and sounds beautiful. It was shot on a soft 35mm film, reminiscent of the days when Diane Keaton ruled the romantic comedy genre. Every shot is crafted with intention, made to emphasize some element of one character or a dynamic between two or more of them.

Underlining some of the film’s most tense moments is a remarkably poised, there-when-you-need-it, gone-when-you-don’t score. In fact, the strings-based comoposition is one of the best I can recall in modern film.

The four characters credited in The Invite are marvelously realized by the cast. Olivia Wilde, Seth Rogen, Edward Norton, and Penélope Cruz each deliver textured performances, equal parts tender and hysterical. The group’s chemistry on set is undeniable, likely in no small part due to stellar direction from Wilde.

The very best movies have an unknowable quality about them. Some wonderful blending together of invisible elements that bring viewers a vast range of the human experience in a relatively short time.

The Invite is one of those movies, and therefore in your author’s opinion, is exactly what going to the movies is supposed to feel like.

A fact or two about the production that makes you say "oh, neat."

→ After wrapping, Seth Rogen handed Olivia Wilde a note that read “I love screaming at you.” The two play an oft-bickering couple in the film. “There’s nothing precious about either of us really,” Wilde said. “There was, like, a permission to speak — permission to scream — freely.”

→ The cast convinced Wilde to star in the film. She’d only planned to direct it. Seth Rogen’s words: “We overtly pressured her to do it. We had a side text chain between us where we would strategize about how to do it and how to launch a multi-pronged attack on her to back her into doing it…I literally made it impossible to hire another person because everyone else you [Wilde] suggested I was like, “I don’t think they’d be good at this.”

→ The film was dedicated to Diane Keaton. Olivia Wilde’s words: “I don’t think that there is an Invite without Diane Keaton because she’s in so many of the films that inspired this film…She is the first actress I recognized to kind of represent a totally unique and complex woman; she didn’t fit any archetype…”

→ The original work it’s based on has been adapted 7 times already. Spanish writer-director Cesc Gay’s 2020 comedy Sentimental, which is based on his own play, has now spawned English, French, Italian, Swiss, Russian, Czech, and South Korean remakes.